Shopify vs Bigcommerce API quality / ease of use

August 1, 2019 8:45 PM

I'm a developer and looking at these two platforms from an integration point of view (updating complex product pricing models, adding new customer accounts and products, etc) I'm looking for recommendations or experiences with the APIs specifically from a developer point of view - are either particularly painful to work with? how is the documentation and community in actual use? Are there scenarios that you'd expect to work that don't?

(Searching for comparisons has been pretty hard since this is seems to be an area that's really heavily SEO-bombed)

posted by xiw to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

I have professional experience working with Shopify, building a fairly large Shopify app. None with Bigcommerce. Shopify’s API is pretty good if you are happy to stay within its boundaries. If you want to break out of them in anyway (for example, custom checkout flows), it can be a doozy. I’ve also found that the documentation for the Shopify API is often just wrong. Things that work according to the docs do not actually work, and there is basically no real support, even if you are an app with thousands of users (maybe the real boutique apps got white glove service, I dunno).

Basically the Shopify API was always a headache. And that’s fine! It’s not the job of the platform to provide a smooth API for some other app to leach off revenue from the mainstream. I guess.

None of this is to say that Bigcommerce was better, and I’ve been out of the Shopify game for a while now (and much happier because of it), but my general experience with the Shopify API was one of running into deadends and blind corners all the time. The fun part was all the notes I had explaining deviations from the docs (e.g., the docs say this property can be set to x, but in fact it’s read only. Or if you don’t set this property, emails will never be sent upon order completion, even though the docs say otherwise, etc.).
posted by dis_integration at 9:20 PM on August 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

My experience with Shopify matches dis_integrations: several years ago when I was working on a big project, the documentation was regularly not up to date with the API, and Shopify support was lacking-it was really hard to find a support person who knew more about the APIs than I did, which was concerning because I didn't know very much.

I also remember being constrained based on service level: if you aren't paying for the fanciest level of Shopify service, expect to be constrained in terms of the kinds of operations that you can do. I was specifically working on complex custom shipping pricing and the service level that my client was on was a challenge, so be sure that features that you want to take advantage of are available at the service level that you plan to use.

I have no experience with Bigcommerce.
posted by Kwine at 6:12 AM on August 2, 2019