We recently hosted a fully-remote, week-long hackathon where we challenged developers to build a Shopify app from start to finish in less than 9 days. We believed that with Gadget, it was possible. With the second Gadget hackathon wrapped up, we’re even more impressed with what Shopify developers can build.

Despite Black Friday looming right around the corner and keeping everyone busy, we had more than 250 developers and teams take on the challenge. Here are the ones who were able to rise to the occasion. 

‍

Overall winner: Accounts Toolkit

The team behind Accounts Toolkit wanted to make it easier for merchants to do more with the Profile and Order Status pages, so they built an app that lets them design customer-facing forms. With Accounts Toolkit, a savvy store team can quickly build and deploy rich, personalized experiences for customers, and use data however they need to streamline operations.

When the customer submits the form, the app stores the data and passes it to Shopify Flow. With the custom Flow trigger, merchants can do practically anything with their form data in, storing it on the customer record, adding it to a Google Sheet, or even passing it to a 3rd party app via an HTTP request.

Of course, everything about the form is fully customizable. Merchants can define when and where the form is displayed, and all the elements and content within a form can be personalized using customer or order data.

‍

Best use of customer accounts: BadgeBoost

Stores that are always looking for new ways to reward loyal shoppers will be big fans of BadgeBoost. This app takes ecommerce loyalty programs to the next level by making it fun and engaging to shop at a Shopify store by earning badges and store credit.

Store admins can create badges that are rewarded based on customer behavior, such as number of orders or order value. When a badge is unlocked, the merchant can define the amount of store credit awarded to the customer. Shoppers can see all their unlocked badges from their customer account page, with a progress bar on any badges they haven’t earned yet.

Overall, this is a great way to keep customers excited and engaged over time, especially with the progress tracking and email updates as shoppers get closer to unlocking rewards.

‍

Most creative: GestureGo

Have you ever wanted to navigate online shopping without using your keyboard or mouse? Well, now you can. 

GestureGo brings a futuristic, touch-free experience to your Shopify store. Shoppers can use 7 unique hand gestures to perform actions as they shop. For example, showing your open palm will open the cart drawer, a closed fist will close the cart drawer, and an “I Love You Gesture” will add a product to the cart. If you give a thumbs up, the page will scroll upwards, while thumbs down will — you guessed it — scroll the page downwards. Pointing up instantly takes you to the top of the page, and a victory sign takes you straight to checkout (if you have items in your cart).

It was clear the GestureGo team had a lot of fun with this build.

‍

Honorable mentions

Despite only having three official winners, every submission this time around felt like it was ready to be released to the app store. Here are some of the projects that stood out to us.

‍

ForgeGifts

One team, made up of Alex Dearmin and Viktor Fonic, created a registry manager. The app is designed to improve the experience for merchants that see a high number of customers buying gifts for family and friends.

With ForgeGifts, shoppers can browse with real-time syncing between a customer’s registry and the store’s inventory, reducing complexity for both merchants and shoppers. The customizable registry pages give shoppers the ability to personalize their own experience, so they can create and share registries easily.

‍

Flow Supercharged

Shopify Flow has changed the game when it comes to customizing the Shopify experience, but it has its limitations. The Rocketify team is here to change that. During the hackathon, they built an app to supercharge Shopify Flow and allow merchants to connect external data and extend the overall capabilities. 

With Flow Supercharged, merchants can even receive an external API (with authentication) as a workflow trigger, then transform data to a usable format for any need. 

Currently, the app includes a workflow to sync Customer ID from an external CRM into the Customer Note field, and the ability to sync variant quantities in Shopify to an external warehouse.

The Rocketify team shared that they’re still working on the project, and hope to eventually release it to the App Store. Their plan is to build a workflow that can automatically fulfill orders and set tracking ids, and another one to update customer information in Klaviyo to automatically send custom emails.

‍

Serenade

Our last honorable mention goes out to a team of Shopify employees. Their app, Serenade, is a checkout extension that personalizes the customer experience by generating a unique haiku at checkout based on customer purchases. 

Instead of a standard confirmation message, customers receive a unique poem that reflects the products included in their order. Merchants can easily generate these haikus through a simple admin interface, adding a creative touch to their communications. With Serenade, merchants engage with their audience in a fun way and make the checkout process that much more memorable for customers.

‍

Thank you again to everyone who participated in the Hackathon. We loved seeing all of the apps you built, and we can't wait for the next one. Until then, if you want to connect with other Gadget developers, you can join our community Discord. Happy coding!