This is part one in a series of articles documenting the process of building our first Shopify app. Follow along the journey with us and let’s see what we can learn!

Hello World!

We are Shopside! A new startup committed to building simple, efficient Shopify apps to improve the merchant and customer experience.

We come from engineering and marketing backgrounds and have a strong interest in both eCommerce and SaaS. We have worked on ventures in both of these spaces over the past few years and are excited to see them come together under the Shopside brand.

How It All Began

Like most Shopify store owners — we leveraged the offerings of the app store to extend the functionality of our website.

Our collective experience of crawling through the app store was a mixed bag. Sometimes we got lucky — the app we needed already existed, was good value for money and appeared to be well supported. More often, we’d be sifting through apps that looked unpolished or didn’t seem like good value for money.

On occasion, when our search came up empty, we built the additional functionality we wanted directly into our store. Naturally we started wondering if the work we were doing could benefit other store owners.

Could we make Shopify apps that tick all the criteria that we had been looking for? Apps that are simple, reliable, good value and well-supported?

We believe we can.

Our Values

We decide to write down our shared values and apply them to the work we do.

1. Proud to share. Put simply, we want to be proud of everything we put our name to. If that is ever not the case, we’ll either continue to iterate until it feels right, or we will shelf the app.
2. Simple and efficient. When it comes to development, we believe that simple is better. Our apps will often be single purpose, solving a particular problem in an efficient way.
3. Be active in the community. We learn a lot from others and want to give back when we feel like we have something valuable to add. We write about the problems we face and the solutions we try — exploring these through both a business and a technical lens.

As a part of our core values, we also promise to:

1. Leave no trace. If a Shopside app is removed from a store, we ensure that none of our code is left behind. If a customer believes they have remnants of a Shopside app floating around their store, we’ll remove it free of charge and make changes to our app so it doesn’t happen to other customers.
2. Unlimited support, forever. We don’t charge extra for our support. If a customer has an active subscription of one of our apps, they’re entitled to unlimited customer support from our team. *

*We don’t offer functional customisation services of our products, but we monitor feature requests and customer feedback closely.

Working with Shopify

Our immediate plans are tightly coupled to Shopify — all our apps will be built for the Shopify app store. Given this relationship, we made it part of our approach to be as good a partner as we can.

We are going to adhere to the Shopify partner guidelines and Polaris framework as closely as possible.

We have lots of ideas about content we’d like to create that showcases what Shopify can do, while also showing the value that our apps can bring.

What’s Next?

We want to share a lot of our thinking and approach with the wider Shopify development community. You’ll find us in the Shopify Slack and Discord groups, with more of our long form content being posted on our website.

Part two of this series is now available, covering our approach to building a reusable authentication system for our apps.