Building a Channel
What is a Channel?
Are you looking to connect buyers to merchants? The first question you should answer is - “How many merchants am I targeting?”. If you are targeting a single merchant, then you should start by reviewing the Storefront API docs.
A Channel can manage up to four fundamental areas:
Account Management is where a merchant will enter any information required to use your Channel. It's also where any preferences and settings will be managed.
If you're dealing with a buyer, you probably need to know about Product Management. This is keeping your systems in sync with Shopify. For example, inventory changes/price changes/title changes and anything else you display to a buyer should be updated whenever the merchant updates the Product on Shopify.
Channels can allow merchants to create advertisements in your systems. If you want to handle adverts, you'll want Advertising Management. This will deal with how to allow merchants to run adverts, and how to report back on the success of those adverts.
If you are anticipating handling the purchase itself, you'll have to consider Order Management. This is the details of how you keep the buyer post purchase experience consistent between your systems and Shopify.
Your Channel should be an Embedded Public App using Polaris React. Shopify does not enforce this, but our patterns will assume you are - if you decide to break from these conventions, it could cause you additional development work. To get started, set up your app as per our Getting Started documentation.
Elements of a Channel
Account Management
This guide will detail the experience a merchant expects from a sales channel. We'll also provide some code snippets for common patterns in our Polaris React library.
- Availability
- Errors
- Resource Feedback
- Metafields
- Publishing Status
- Inventory Updates
- Using Shopify Checkout
- Creating a direct Order
- Managing Fulfillments
- Managing Payments
- Attribution
- Creating an Ad Template
- Analytics