What is a Shopify App? Shopify is a pretty capable ecommerce platform on its own, and for a lot of shopowners, it's all they need for their shops. However, there are many cases where shopowners need features and capabilities that don't come "out of the box" with Shopify. That's what apps are for: to add those extra features and capabilities to Shopify. Apps make use of the Shopify API, which lets you programatically access a shop's data -- items for sale, orders and so on -- and take most of the actions available to you from a shop's control panel. An app can automate a tedious or complex task for a shopowner, make the customer's experience better, give shopowners better insight into their sales and other data, or integrate Shopify with other applications' data and APIs in useful ways. Here are some apps that you can find at the Shopify App Store. These should give you an idea of what's possible: Jilt: This is an app that makes shopowner's lives easier. It helps turn abandoned carts -- they arise when a customer shops on your store, puts items in the cart and then for some reason never completes the purchase -- into orders. It sends an email to customers who've filled carts but never got around to buying their contents after a specified amount of time. It's been shown to recover sales that would otherwise never have been made. Searchify: Here's an app that makes the customer experience more pleasant. It's an autocompleting search box that uses the data in your shop that lets customers see matching products as they type. The idea is that by making your shop easier to search, you'll get more sales. Beetailer: A good example of taking the Shopify API and combining it with other APIs. It lets your customers comment on your shop's products and share opinions about them on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. You can harness
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