Tictail is built on simplicity. Throughout whatever we build, we always keep this core concept at heart. The Tictail Apps platform is no exception to this.

Apps is our way of opening up Tictail for other developers to build features on. We recognise that we alone could never fulfill all the requirements each and every unique store in the e-commerce world would have. With the help of the developer community we have a better chance of satisfying more store owners, while also giving app builders the opportunity to earn extra money on the side, or even build businesses around Tictail.

I spent a big part of my time in the Tictail Apps project with building the tools that third party developers use today to build their apps. We put a lot of effort into making the app building process as simple and exciting as it could possibly be, so I’m proud to talk about some of the things that we created during the project.

We divide our apps into two categories, Native and External Apps. The External app category is for those who already have a running service and want to integrate it with Tictail. An External app is mostly a connection between a Tictail account and an account on another service, and the app is used outside of the Tictail dashboard. Native apps are on the other hand embedded right into the dashboard, and can be experienced just the same way as our other features.

Most developers who build a Native app will have to start out from scratch, so we wanted to focus on this process to make developers delighted to start working on their new project. To lower the barriers to entry, we needed to remove many of the inconveniences and intimidating aspects that are usually related to app development.