Shopify Developer with Shopify API Salary in 2024

Shopify APIs: Types, Usage

Shopify is an E-commerce option for businesses that don’t want to deal with building and designing a site themselves. It lets you create an online store, as well as sell offline with Shopify POS. 

With Shopify REST APIs, developers can create integrations that will make merchants’ online/offline payments, marketing, product management and listing on global marketplaces more effective. 

What is REST API?

 REST API is a style of API that adheres to a set of constraints by which an application should talk to another application/service. 

For an API to be said to conform to REST, it must satisfy some requirements, eg: 

• Statelessness
• Cacheable
• Decoupled
• Layered

What is Shopify API

Shopify’s APIs can incentivise developers to code, assemble, package and issue out Shopify Apps that can enhance the lives of merchants and their businesses.

Types of Shopify APIs

1) Admin API

 You can add more features to your Shopify store's UX by using the Admin API for that. Shopify Admin API is versioned and it provides both GraphQL and REST.

2) Storefront API

A Shopify Storefront API empowers a store owner to totally control the look and feel of his or her E-commerce website (including changing templates and Abandoned Cart Recovery) in one platform.

3) Payment Apps API

Using the Payments Apps API, developers can now retrieve their configuration data so they can set up their applications with Shopify Payments.

4) Partner API

The Partner API allows Shopify Partners to access the information displayed in their Partner Dashboard. This grants them access into a central opening for an e-commerce floor, enjoying a seamless integration of their front- and back-office.

5) Ajax API

The Ajax API is a set of lightweight Shopify REST API endpoints for building Shopify themes.

6) Section Rendering API

The AJAX and the SRAPI (Section Rendering API) are two ways for a user to call for the markup of theme sections. It enables store owners to change page content without the need to reload the whole page – instead just the parts that it needs to modify are fetched and swapped in.

7) Customer Privacy API

One of these is an API that allows developers to access information about the buyer’s consent to tracking by reading and writing cookies. It is a web-browser JavaScript API that is provided as a property on the global window.

8) Messaging API

With it, we’re able to send messages to the Shopify Inbox (web, Android and iOS App that enables Shopify merchants to consolidate their business conversations from SMS and messaging applications like Facebook Messenger) via a messaging API.

Key Usage of Shopify APIs 

1) Shopify API Authentication

You can verify apps and services against Shopify’s platform in one of two ways: You can understand why it’s not always in an app or service’s best interest to allow you to back up your data: 

• OAuth
• Basic HTTP authentication

Users can access tokens in one of the two modes:

• Online token:
  Linked to an individual user on a store, but the token will have a short-lived lifetime (the length of time that an individual user’s web session is active) – used for instances where a user interacts with your app via the web. 
• Offline access: 
  These are for extensive access to the store offline, and are meant to be called without any hydration. The recommended use is for background work in response to Webhooks. 

2) Shopify API Access Scopes

During the App Authorization Process, the user is asked which parts they wish to allow the access. Any unauthenticated or authenticated access can be requested by an app. The new access scopes are open to all AccessScope resource, through GraphQL Admin API and Shopify REST API. 

3) Shopify API versioning

As a result of API versioning, continuous change of platforms becomes possible by providing third-party developers with a predictable path for feature upgrades and deprecations.

4) Shopify API Rate Limits

All Shopify APIs are now rate-limited to ensure the stability and fairness of the platform for all users. They also apply a number of rate limits and standard best practices for caching results, throttling calls, and responsible retrying of requests.

a) GraphQL API Rate Limits
The rate limits of GraphQL Admin API calls depend on estimated query costs, which means you will be held back not according to the number of requests but according to the cost of your requests in consecutive time periods.

It’s based on the combination of store and apps such that it enforces the limits even if different apps are operating on the same store. Here, let’s focus on the combination store and app2.  Similarly it ensures that even the same app calls to one store don’t enforce the rate limits of another store.

b) Shopify REST API Rate Limits
The limits on Shopify REST API calls are request based, resource based, and throttled. Users also need to tally up the total number of API calls to your app. They also include the combination of the app and store, and calls from one app/store have no impact on the other.

c) Storefront API Rate Limits
Shopify limits calls to the Storefront API based on time, rather than quantity. So you can't measure the total number of requests you send, you have to measure how much time the requests take to complete.

d) Resource-Based Rate Limits
Aside from the first resource, aspects of Shopify REST API and GraphQL Admin API are subject to an extra throttle in a store with more than 50,000 product variants. Once you hit these quotas, you can create only 1,000 new versions per day.

5) Pagination 

The parameters used with REST endpoints so as to retrieve these sets of results are also supported by GraphQL under the name cursor-based pagination.

And if you use a connection to get a listing of resources, then arguments are employed to specify the number of results to retrieve.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about Shopify APIs:

• Can I integrate my app with Shopify?
  
  There are Shopify apps that you can install to grow your business, integrate with external services, and power up your Shopify admin. In fact, almost all Shopify apps – tens of thousands of them – have been created by third-party developers, not by Shopify.
• What does Shopify API use to communicate with REST web service?
  
  pyactiveresource is the program, used by the Shopify API, that communicates with the REST web service. It shouldn’t be run without the fully authorized URL of a given store. To acquire the URL, there are a number of steps to walk through.
• How can merchant-branded themes be built?
  
  Shopify stores use their own themes that is coded into the Liquid templating language which is used to control the appearance of their stores. Image Source: www.obedient.comYou can edit things like the content in the page, design of Shopify themes, add dynamic elements into the Shopify online stores, tabulates tables and products in tabs and so on.Liquid, Ajax API and Section Rendering API are the functions responded to the above requests.