Yesterday I was talking to a Shopify store owner.

He needs to adjust his products periodically by downloading them from his Shopify store and pasting them into an Excel spreadsheet. Then he edits the CSV file in Excel and uploads the new file back to his store.

This is always a good sign of a great product because he's trying to fix the problem himself.

No-code to the rescue

As a Shopify App Developer Expert, I know that there are a lot of necessary steps needed to make an app just up and running.

It's an idea worth looking into, but instead of diving into product development, it's a good idea to understand the process of how he did it regularly.

What if we used Google Sheet as an intermediate step in product development?

"What if we used your current method but automated it?" - I asked.

It helps me understand the problem space, observe the expected behavior and see how the user thinks and solves it.

• We can connect your Shopify store to the Google Sheet to download the data and use it later.

• We can automatically do the manipulations in Google Sheets based on the new data.

• We can upload the manipulated data from Google Sheets to Shopify.

• We can do the whole 3 step process daily without interaction, so it's a set and forget it system for you.

Connect your Sheet to Shopify with GraphQL

The first step we need to do is connect to your store.

This is where Google Apps Script (GS) comes into play. So you can add your code to Google Sheet and download the data from your store.

You can download the code here.

• You need to create a private app first.

• Set the permission for this private app.

• Set the name of your store.

• Set your key and secret

• Run the Script

Code snippet available here:

https://gist.github.com/davidpgero/3351d0dcadeb6e1b34303a58b46cf7eb