BigCommerce: Building Apps & App Extensions
Apps make up a HUGE part of the BigCommerce platform. Apps provide additional functionality on top of the BigCommerce platform that help merchants and developers do a variety of things, and are an incredibly valuable part of the ecosystem. Apps are available to download on merchant’s stores, and App Extensions add those apps seemingly natively to the merchant’s Control Panel.
🏁 Apps: Getting Started
Building an app for the BigCommerce Marketplace is easy! To get started, check out our Apps Guide and follow the instructions! They’ll walk you through forking and cloning our NodeJS sample app to get you started.
👾 What are App Extensions?
An App Extension is a progressive enhancement to an app that is visible and useful to merchants, custom-built by developers. At their core, App Extensions are deep links to particular pages — Products, Customers, and Orders — within your app that can add new features, modify existing ones, and integrate with other systems to enhance the functionality of a BigCommerce store.
App Extensions allow developers to register custom menu items that appear on standard Control Panel pages allowing merchants to navigate directly to related parts of the app with ease.
To learn more about App Extensions:
- App Extensions documentation
- Developer Blog: App Extensions are Now Available for All BigCommerce App Developers! (opens in a new tab)
- 💥🎥 Video: App Extensions with Rob Alvarez (opens in a new tab) - Watch Rob Alvarez, Lead Software Engineer at BigCommerce and member of the App Extensions team, walk through what App Extenisons are and see why they may be a fit for your application!
📚 Resources
- Open Source Repo: AI App Foundations (opens in a new tab) - 💥Note: You can use this app to get your own AI project up and running! App Extensions are pre-installed, so a lot of the work is done for you!
- App Extensions Documentation
- Developer Blog: App Extensions (opens in a new tab)
- BigCommerce Apps: Getting Started Guide