Best Sellers - The final countdown

2 min read
created Mar 24 2016

The launch of my Best Seller Insights app is fast approaching. I am planning to submit my app for review to Shopify sometime next week.

When I initially set out to build this app, I set an arbitrary deadline of 2 months, which would have been a launch date of March 1st. As you can see, I didn't quite make that.

I do think 2 months is a reasonable timeline for developing a Shopify app. For example, the guys at Hextom developed 7 apps in 6 months. That's an average of 1.71 months per person per app.

So what is the cause of the delay? Some of the delay is definitely attributed to ramping up on things I haven't done before, such as the Shopify Embedded App SDK. In addition, my Best Seller Insights app needs to manage more data than I originally anticipated. For instance, my app needs to:

  • Store a copy of all Products for each shop to enable custom best-seller collection creation.
  • Store the most recent (ongoing) 3 months of Orders for a shop to build a list of the current best sellers.
  • Create / Update Best Seller collection items with custom filters and sorting based on sales rank.
  • Update Product Metafields with best-seller collection data for use in Liquid themes.

I have a fair amount of things to finish before I submit my app for review. Some things, such as billing, are not going to make the cut until after the app goes through a bit of testing with real store owners. If I can't finish it by next week, it will have to wait until the next release.

I'm really looking forward to getting this app in the hands of Shopify merchants to see what they think.

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