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I’m developing a custom app for one of my customers who is using Shopify as their online shop. I want to add a subscription feature to the shop so customers can checkout once but will get their order every x weeks etc.
The problem is that I need to connect the shop to an enterprise resource planning (ERP). I’ve seen a lot of Shopify apps that support recurring payments but none of them would allow to also connect with the ERP.
We’re using only Stripe and Paypal for the checkout. Both of them offer subscriptions but I cannot wrap my head around on how to connect the Shopify checkout with those. I hope someone has a hint for me, thank you!
2
Answers
Shopify has selected to not support subscriptions since day one. One day, they might flip a switch and support it. Till then, you have to your own checkout with your own payment gateway. A couple of Apps provide for this. What you would do is intercept the Checkout click from the cart. Render a page with the Stripe/Paypal details for the subscription, and then process them yourself. You could finish that off with the calls to the ERP yourself.
I did all that over eight years ago for a client, so it is not terribly new or hard to do, but you do lose a lot of Shopify management of orders going this route, unless you also take care to produce order results as well. So ya… it is a lot of work for minimal gain, something totally bizarre on the part of Shopify to not support.
Disclaimer: I work at the company I’m about to mention. Having said that, I would suggest you take a look at Cartfunnel. It was built to solve the exact problem (ie. initially with recurring billing + external integrations) and it might solve a few problems for you out of the box:
It also features a RESTful API that you can use to integrate with your ERP.