A WTF Shopify/Slack Integration Story
ModernAgile.org has a not-for-profit shop for stickers, posters, magnets, etc. That shop is powered by Shopify. Since we use Slack heavily throughout each day, we wanted to setup a notification from Shopify to Slack, so we could easily see who bought what.
We found certain plugins to do this work. And sure enough, we’d get messages in Slack about orders. But here’s the WTF moment: the messages were summaries of each order, lacking details about what exactly was purchased, in what quantity, for what price. Here’s an example:
One Modern Agile sticker does not cost $74.36! Clearly, Susan bought several 4x4 inch stickers. How many? To see the details, you have to type in a command. No bueno. I’m not going to do that all day to satisfy my curiosity about what someone purchased.
Now let me be clear that I myself am not fulfilling these orders. There are a few people I employ who fulfill Modern Agile shop orders. And these people were not complaining about any of this software. They usually see an order come in, log in to Shopify to get the full order details and see everything necessary to fulfill an order.
My role in this is simply being aware of sales and I’m not keen to log in to Shopify to see those details. I just want to know who’s buying what, as I enjoy seeing people purchasing Modern Agile items.
So I wanted messages to travel from Shopify to Slack with FULL DETAILS of an order.
You’d think that would be like, um, totally, super easy, right?
No, it’s not. We found no plugin to do this basic thing! You’d think there would be a basic configuration to let the user configure the actual contents of the Shopify-to-Slack message, even if it was a simple as Give Me A Summary or Give Me Full Details.
So, out of pure frustration, our own Miguel Peres simply wrote the integration code we wanted. Now here’s a typical message we get in Slack, with all relevant details of an order, including a total price:
I’d like to thank Miguel Peres for writing this code. I’d like for the developers of plugins like Slackify to wake up to the fact that users need a basic ability to configure what information they want to see, without the burden of typing commands into Slack. And I’d like to say that part of Making Users Awesome is removing tiny hassles like this, so you get the information you want at speed with little-to-no hassle. :-)
