Mechanic

Name: Mechanic
Rating: 5.0 (1 reviews)

A development and automation platform for Shopify.

5.0•1 review•

0 followers

A development and automation platform for Shopify.

5.0•1 review•

0 followers

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Mechanic is a development and automation platform, for unlocking the full potential of Shopify. Write tasks in Liquid; we’ll handle the GraphQL and REST APIs, the scaling, and the uptime. Merchants, developers, and agencies of all sizes use Mechanic.

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Launch tags:Productivity•Developer Tools•E-Commerce

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Tines The single, secure environment for agents, apps, and automations.

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In a nutshell, Mechanic enables me to do heaps of great server-side things on Shopify. The best part about it is that it's my portal to getting under Shopify's hood and into my store's data without having to develop and provision resources to run my own Shopify private app. I originally tried to use Shopify Flow, but was really saddened that I couldn't write custom flows -- but then I found Mechanic! I gravitate to building my own tasks, but there are plenty of pre-built tasks that don't require coding (and you can use them as templates to then make your own custom modifications). Mechanic tasks are written using an extended version of Shopify's liquid, so it's pretty easy to pick up if you've ever developed Shopify themes, or even used other projects that use liquid as a templating language (jekyll, Salesforce Desk, Zendesk, etc.). It gives me the ability to write and run automations across my Shopify data (e.g. generate PDFs, regularly email customers for outstanding payments, etc.). Often I also use it for utility methods like to correct some data entry issues, or for things like out of stock/back in stock notifications for my colleagues. I have a number of tasks which also access various third-party APIs (even some custom APIs I built myself). It supports features like using Shopify bulk GraphQL queries which make querying 1000s of data entries pretty easy if I need to run something across all my orders or customers in Shopify. Since Mechanic works based on webhook triggers, you can basically write a task for any kind of Shopify webhook (as well as other Mechanic or custom webhooks -- or "topics", to use Mechanic parlance). An example of something basic but important: our 3PL doesn't give us the DHL AWB number when an order is fulfilled (we get one or many piece IDs -- really annoying), so I have a task that retrieves the AWB via DHL API and replaces the tracking number when the order has a fulfillment. Fixed! This then unlocks DHL order tracking status within Shopify backoffice. Probably the most ambitious/crazy thing I've done so far is create a customer account spam detection task which can automatically tag and/or delete customers who fit the spam account criteria when customers are created/updated. I can even have Mechanic send me notification emails when an account is tagged or deleted 🌈 In terms of the Mechanic platform, it's pretty reliable and the Mechanic team are always interested and engaged when there's help needed or new ideas to be hashed out. It's a very cool community to be involved in! I'm glad to have been using it for the last 2 years and it really forms a backbone to our e-commerce operations to ensure colleagues' work is easier, data quality is improved, and that custom third-party integrations with Shopify can easily be achieved, even if there's no official Shopify app for the third-party. My background was using things like Magento and WordPress for e-commerce, where it is much easier to build something custom and have full access to the data, so using a platform like Shopify required a paradigm shift. Mechanic does bring me back a little closer to "self-hosted" without the pitfalls of needing to fuss about PHP and crashing my website!

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5yr ago

Maker

@mattscheurich Thank you for the wonderful feedback! Thank you!!

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5yr ago

I've been using Mechanic for at least 7 months. This tool has really allowed our small business to create solutions and be really flexible, without having to worry about provisioning infrastructure. I can't really emphasize enough just how much I love this app.

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5yr ago

Maker

@vanin_ferrall Thank you!! We appreciate the feedback and support!

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5yr ago

I absolutely love Mechanic and have become a self proclaimed Mechanic ambassador :) With every client I work with, I give them all the reasons they need this app for their shop, and most of my larger clients have utilized it for a wide array of critical business needs. I have always felt this app extends Shopify in such a meaningful way, and if Shopify was smart they'd partner more closely with the Mechanic team. On top of the super useful app, the community is very active, and extremely helpful and responsive.

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5yr ago

Maker

@solvinsights "self proclaimed Mechanic ambassador" - love, love, love it!!!!! Thank you!

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5yr ago

When using Mechanic as my primary solution development platform, I feel there are almost no automation challenges that cannot be tackled. In two years of developing with Mechanic, I’ve been able to develop custom automations to: - Build out complex backend support for multi-location local pickup and delivery - Destructure virtual bundles into their products components and add them as zero price products without needing to create product duplicates or hidden variants - Develop scheduled product, inventory, and customer exports as Shopify importable CSV - Auto-fulfill and add tracking to orders by parsing inbound dropshipper fulfillment emails - Send localized payment reminder emails by customer’s checkout language - Develop a custom order status notification flow that integrates with an Asana task board - Email daily pick lists (e.g. unfulfilled items) by location for a national grocery chain - Run nightly bulk inventory updates via FTP downloads - Re-assign warehouse order fulfillments by shipping country - Tag Shopify customers by Smile.io VIP Tier - [... this list could be several pages… :) ] In addition to the expansive public task directory, the platform documentation is very thorough and the support is beyond superb. The team at Mechanic are highly responsive to helping empower your platform usage, regardless of whether you are an advanced Shopify developer, or just getting your feet wet. Perhaps one of Mechanic's best features is its ability to let you just concentrate on solving the merchant’s immediate business needs without all of the repetitive scaffolding required to develop each new microservice. Almost everything is managed for you - task queuing and processing, form options for merchant task configuration (the task admin UI), API rate limiting, error logging, webhook configuration, transactional email, inbound email parsing, and so much more. All-in-all, the Mechanic platform has really upped my Shopify development and solution consulting service to new levels, making me a much more complete and valuable resource for merchant’s in need. Thank you Mechanic and team!

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5yr ago

It's rare that I feel passionate about a Shopify App, let alone any app at all. Mechanic however—I'm in love ❤️. Shopify has incredible API support, but it can be challenging to make use of the APIs to their fullest, even for a seasoned developer. Even if you have the skills, you still need to build your own application to make use of the APIs, worry about choosing a build environment, hosting, deployment, maintenance, downtime, and all the other stuff that comes with a custom solution. Alternatively, you can use an automator/integrator like Zapier, but then you're limited to the functionality that the automator platform chooses to expose. Mechanic removes all that, and give you access to the full power of Shopify's API's, all using the familiar language of liquid that so many of us developers work with day in and day out. It used to be that if I needed a small custom solution for one of our shops, I would spend days trying to remember how to set up a Ruby environment, get it hosted on Heroku, get webhooks working, and then have a barely working application that did just that one thing and nothing else. Since beginning to use Mechanic in 2020, I honestly don't think I'll ever build a custom Shopify application again. Mechanic has empowered to me to create all kinds of solutions for our business that I never even considered attempting in the past—the barrier to entry was just too high. With Mechanic, I can just write a task to do whatever I want, and best of all, *have fun doing it.* Mechanic has enabled so many things for our business, and perhaps the best example is something I said on the community Slack recently, regarding the automatic invoice printing that I built using Mechanic: "PrintNode + Mechanic is friggin awesome! Whenever we receive an order I hear the printer start going before I even notice the Shopify notification."

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5yr ago

It's really powerful and I don't have to set up a custom app to do all the things it can do. The possibilities are pretty much endless and you can really make the app do whatever your store needs to do if it is in the Shopify backend

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5yr ago

5.0

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