The Holiday Gift Shop review for Mechanic
Dec. 21, 2020
TLDR; 1) If you're a developer, you owe it to yourself to learn and use this app. 2) Read the Manual! It will save you a lot of time and frustration. Long version: Are you a developer? Then why aren't you using this app yet?! Seriously, this app will change the way you build your shopify stores. The amount of power this app offers you is simply unparalleled. We use Integromat (similar to Zapier) to automate a lot of backend stuff for us, and Mechanic has been slowly replacing those workflows with cleaner, more native-feeling solutions. It's also given us the ability to do a lot of things we couldn't even do before. Mechanic has a bit of a learning curve, but the way it's built around the liquid code that every shopify developer knows helps you to feel right at home after a couple days. One tip though...RTFM!!! I know we all like to just dive in and figure things out on our own, but trust me, you will waste a lot of time by not orienting yourself with the basic concepts of how Mechanic works. An understanding of Actions, Events, Webhooks, Tasks, and Runs is ESSENTIAL. You'll also want to read over the Mechanic Liquid documentation, as they've added a number of extensions to the language that help with things like handling arrays and hashes. Lastly, support is awesome, and there's a friendly little Slack community where you can get help and help others out. PS- Lightward's pay-what-you-think-is-fair pricing structure is amazing, especially for a developer-oriented, usage-based app like this. In our case, we thought we were getting far more value from the app than their suggested subscription plan, so we opted to pay more than they asked. In other cases though, I could see us paying less if we weren't making very heavy use of the app on one of our stores. I wish this was more common, as we've come across some great apps in the past where we just couldn't justify the subscription cost, since we were being charged for a bunch of features that we weren't using.
