Rushabh PatelBigCommerce is an eCommerce platform providing open SaaS for merchants to innovate, build, and eventually grow their online business without much complexity or overhead costing involved in traditional eCommerce solutions. BigCommerce app provides the best scope for innovation as they leverage the latest technologies while partnering with a large client base.
Besides, their technology stack is very diverse, and they also offer APIs which can leverage their stack of tech as per preference. Merchants have autonomy and are free to choose their way of building their brand. This leverages the development of worldwide engineers. Open SaaS platforms help in enabling the developer’s community to think on a large scale and create amazing and beneficial apps.
Why building a Bigcommerce app is essential?
By building a Bigcommerce marketplace app, one can open up more doors of possibilities for your products and services. Presently, BigCommerce is responsible for powering the commercial aspects of most of the world’s leading brands. It makes the BigCommerce marketplace a much sought-after global company. As your products reach the BigCommerce Marketplace, it gains a worldwide impact on a larger scale, hence, opening up newer streams of revenue for your company.
Moreover, building a BigCommerce marketplace app enables your business in more ways than one and makes it more accessible to worldwide consumers. Modern-day consumers like to receive all amenities through their smartphones. Mobile apps provide the best interface for them to interact with big brands on the go and avail their services and products at ease.
Thus, developing the app related to BigCommerce is the way ahead for many modern-day businesses that are aiming to expand their outreach and grow their business manifold.
How to get started using BigCommerce?
Whether you are starting from scratch or trying to grow your existing business by integrating eCommerce into it, you cannot do it without thinking big. Now you probably might already have some big ideas playing around your head. Take advantage of the APIs in BigCommerce and create a single click app for the Marketplace. Thus, this way, you can focus on the big ideas on your head and gain development speed to reach your strategic goals.
In the end, you must materialize your ideas, and your goals must become successful. Before you learn to make your first BigCommerce single click app, let us learn what it means first.
What is a Single click app?
Single click apps are installable across all stores and available at the BigCommerce marketplace. Merchants can authenticate the apps through BigCommerce by deploying an Auth Implementation, which is integrated into the app. You can authenticate using a single click and allow for easier setup flow and installation. App requirements might ask for necessary additional setup, yet the app is available after authentication on their store.
Marketplace users want their apps to be easy to install and use. Hence we need to lower the barrier of entry for the merchants by making their apps single-click. These single click apps render an iframe directly inside the merchant’s store. One has the ability to make the app look as per their preference and can send the HTML that is displayed in the iframe. Its React component library makes your app integrate seamlessly and makes it easier to use.
Bit about APIs
As you become familiar with APIs and their docs, you will find creating a Single-click app a bit less challenging. In fact, it’ll become more rewarding. APIs in BigCommerce provides us with the foundation for all the BigCommerce app development works. These APIs are responsible for making BigCommerce Open SaaS.
We can find plenty of BigCommerce app developer docs, including a list of all the APIs available in the About our APIs list in the BigCommerce Dev Center. It also showcases the endpoints of these APIs and their designated objectives.
App authentication and API testing
Now that you know the basics of APIs, you need to start authenticating and testing them. This is essential because by authenticating and testing the APIs, we could obtain hands-on experience that would enable us to gain fast cycles of app development with clearly defined objectives.
Besides, app authentication requires Secrets and Client IDs. You could create both of them using My Apps and Storefront. Therefore, to access all the APIs, you will need both a developer’s account and a sandbox store. Open the request runner in your browser and start an interaction with all the APIs such as Graphql, REST, and Storefront.
How to start building apps?
To start building apps, you need the right tools and resources. The BigCommerce Dev Center provides us with adequate tools, to begin with. To name a few, we have the BigDesign, Headless Integration, Theme Resources, SDKs, API clients, and Hello World Apps that can enhance the BigCommerce app developers’ experience overall.
The library has great articles, examples, and starter codes that can help beginners. They also provide a Best Practices guideline to ensure that we review all the limits, webhooks, and threading while building the app.
App Testing
Once you build the app and have a stable one at hand, it’s time to test it through the sandbox store.
- Go to Dev Center
- Click on MyApps
- Keep editing the app till all appropriate callbacks are attained.
- Go to your sandbox store and find the apps.
- Draft the apps and install them to the store as per requirement.
Review your work
After you have created your app, it is time to review it. To do that first, you have to become a Tech Partner with the BigCommerce teams. You have to first apply for the Technology Partner Program on their Partner portal and apply through the application form.
As you successfully apply, you become an approved Tech Partner and get to review the second half of the Approval requirements of the App Store. This will provide a stepwise guideline for submitting your app for subsequent review by the BigCommerce team. Once the team has approved your app and tested it, its deployment will be performed to the Marketplace for purchasing from the merchants.
Conclusion
Getting associated with the world of BigCommerce is a major requirement nowadays for business enterprises. Becoming a BigCommerce Technology Partner might just be the start of things for your company. Developing your first BigCommerce app might appear an arduous task for a few app developers. But once you are there, you feel like jumping on to your next BigApp.
