[btown]

One of the things I find fascinating is that in the days where it was Liquid templates, and Vercel etc. were barely a twinkle in people's eyes, Shopify had a huge value add - that you or an app development consultancy could iterate on customizing interfaces here and there, and deploy changes from the CLI or directly on the Shopify platform, without needing to worry about deployment, payment processing, etc.

But so much has changed now. Deploying a customized frontend has a negligible cost, and the API surface that Shopify powers could be powered by a myriad of tools, with Stripe etc. doing large amounts of heavy lifting on the administrative side.

Were contractual obligations, and not wanting to bite the hand that feeds, the only thing preventing longstanding Shopify app developers from joining together and creating an industry-standard alternative API surface that could be deployed in different ways?

[threeseed]

My partner runs a medium sized ecommerce store on Shopify and her priority is having a system that is simple and stress-free.

And whilst she appreciates all of the Shopify Apps they are secondary to the fundamental process of taking, processing and shipping orders.

The key to the whole ecosystem are non-technical users like her not the app developers.

[Bombthecat]

And people who think they will be the next big store :)