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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T03:16:45+00:00

I was redirected here by Shopify support. I have three main questions for a

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I was redirected here by Shopify support. I have three main questions for a project I’ll be working on and wanted to see how possible some of the things would be.

We are looking to develop a plugin for use with Shopify to track purchases through the use of a link shortener (to see which link referred what purchases, etc.). I have a few questions that I’m not 100% sure on even after reading through the documentation.

The first problem that I seem to have is tracking the query string that the link shortener appends to the URL once it redirects. For this service, they use “?visit_id={hash}” and I need to be able to access this–at the very least on the “Thank You” page after an order. I saw in the docs that there is “landing_page_ref” (http://wiki.shopify.com/Order#landing_site_ref) but considering our query string is “visit_id” instead of one of the acceptable parameters, how would I be able to use that query string?

Lastly, I just have a question about how webhooks work with plugins that are on the app store. I know I can just call webhooks to wherever I want, like my personal server, but if this app gets onto the app store, I obviously don’t want to hook everything to my own server. Is there a way to make it run on the store itself, and which URL should I use?

Lastly, what is the preferred method for handling configuration options for the plugin? Is there a way to hook into the admin backend or would all configuration have to be in a file within the plugin?

Thanks,
Andrew

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ll do my best to answer these for you. It sounds like you’re used to building plugins for something like WordPress – Shopify apps are a bit different.

    1. You can’t access anything on the thank you page for the order.

      The thank you page/checkout process goes through a secured Shopify page that you don’t have access to – so if you want information about what your URL shortener attached to the store pages, you’ll need to retrieve it while they’re on the page (using something like a ScriptTag + Javascript to track the query string), or hope that it’s inside the Order when you retrieve it later (using the API or a webhook).

    2. Webhooks need to talk to a server you run.

      They send the information to you, and then you process it and deal with it. If you want to use webhooks, you will need to run a server with your app on it for the webhooks to talk to.

    3. You manage your own config.

      Because you’re running your own server to handle those webhooks, you handle configuration for your plugin there. The apps I’ve worked on typically have their own database for managing configuration options, as well as an admin panel to manage them (it’s what the user accesses when they click ‘Log Into [Your App]’ on the "Manage Apps" screen).

    You’ll need to run your own server to host your Shopify app.

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