Powering shopify with addition of extended feature (Part I)

Powering shopify with addition of extended feature (Part I)

Hey!! fellas,

If you are currently starting to work or have been working with shopify, you may be pretty well aware about the limitations of shopify. Shopify just allows us to modify their template and do basic functioning. But there are lots of features and processing that an e-commerce store require which shopify doesn’t provide by default. So basically shopify doesn’t provide us the flexibility to do server side programming or processing. We are bounded to the frontend data manipulation only. But there are ways to extend shopify features which is described below.

This limitation have led most of us to scratch our head on either to choose the platform itself or not for our store development. So as a developer we all have a question that either or not we are able to incorporate additional functionality to extend shopify features or not which requires the server or backend processing.

Actually you may have been led to this post with same question in mind as there are not much resource found over internet on this topic and the shopify support themselves don’t provide much information on this level of customization.

So the answer to your question “Are we able to enhance or incorporate the additional functionality in shopify?” is YES!!

So the immediate question that arises in your mind is HOW??

It’s actually a separate middleware system or some server side code like PHP hosted on a different server. We will then send an AJAX request to that middleware system from shopify. In response to that AJAX request, we get the processed data from the serverside code. That response data can be used in our shopify store.Later we can manipulate and use that data.

The simple example would be to allow customer choose order/shipping related option according to their postcodes. The flow could be customer needs to choose the delivery day during checkout (in cart page). So our middleware stores all the information of delivery days associated with the postcode. When the customer types in the postcode on shopify we send an AJAX request to the middleware and get those dates as response. Later that response can be used to fed data to a jquery datepicker and make the available delivery day selectable.

This is a basic example, you can think of as many implementation as you can using this way.

This tutorial covers the basic, I will go in details on how to actually do this i.e send across domain AJAX request in shopify in my next post.

Check out my other blog posts related to magento and shopify here. Stay updated!!