Over the past few years, our developer ecosystem has built and launched hundreds of Shopify Apps that have improved the lives of our merchants and their businesses. These apps would not exist without the thousands of developers working tirelessly to enhance the functionality of our platform.
We want to empower you to build bigger and better than ever before. Today, we're proud to grant developers access to three new APIs and announce the official public release of our POS SDK. These tools will give you the ability to create enhanced solutions for Shopify merchants — whether within a specific Shopify store or as part of your own Shopify App.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these new APIs, as well as our POS SDK.
Analytics API
From product sales, to payment methods, to website cart analysis, Shopify offers merchants a suite of performance reports for measuring the success of their businesses. These pre-made reports are generated within Shopify by our internal merchant analytics database.
For the first time ever, we are opening up our analytics platform to our developer community. This means that your Shopify Apps can read aggregate data from Shopify to create insightful reports and charts for merchants.
Your apps can interact with our analytics platform using ShopifyQL. This is similar to SQL and allows your app to read information about storefront sessions. We plan to expose sales, payments, and other data models within ShopifyQL in the near future.
Want to learn more? Get started with the Analytics API today.
Refund and Transaction API
Your Shopify Apps can now access our Refund and Transaction API to calculate and process refunds for merchants. This API is the same one that we use in Shopify POS, and it complements the existing Transaction API.
With this API, you can now have complete confidence that you are refunding customers on a merchant’s behalf accurately. Your Shopify App determines the products and quantities to refund, and can specify whether to issue a full or partial refund to the amount paid by the customer for shipping.
The Refund and Transaction API will calculate the correct amount to refund to the customer, taking into account anything which may have affected the product’s price at the time of purchase, such as discounts and applicable taxes. Your Shopify App can use this API to calculate the suggested refund amount, and then create and process the refund.
Learn more about the new Refund API.
Shopify POS App SDK
We launched the Shopify POS App SDK last year as a private beta. As of today, this SDK is available to all Shopify developers. With the POS App SDK, you can build interactive apps that show up inside of Shopify POS using the same web frameworks you’re used to. You can modify the contents of a cart, add and remove discounts, and create line item properties — along with all other functions of the Shopify API.
Learn more about the Shopify POS App SDK.
Calling all app developers
These new APIs open up a world of possibilities for Shopify app developers — we hope they’ve inspired you to create the next generation of Shopify Apps.
New to building with Shopify? Sign up for a developer’s account to get started.
