ezInvoices Update: Language Support & Feedback Feature

I've pushed two new updates to ezInvoices this past week! ezInvoices is now available in English, French, Spanish, German, and Hindi! The second update is a Feedback page that will survey's app survey users to help me decide on my roadmap development path. Let's first look our language support! I had a client ask if they could get the PDFs in French since they are a Canadian company and services some of their clients in French. The invoice needed to be in French. I've never translated an app before, so this was a nice learning experience for me and I jumped right in. It went so well that I decided to add Spanish, German, and Hindi! The reason for those languages was pretty simple: I look at all the Shopify stores that installed ezInvoices and thought those languages used it the most. The first part was making a selector to choose the language of the PDF order invoice that was generated. It worked really well, and in the mean time I was able to decrease the response time from our app's server to the client. Originally, we were generating the PDF invoice between 600-800ms. After our changes, response times are around 200-250ms! With the support for multiple languages now available when generating your Shopify order invoice, the app felt strange with the rest of the text in English. I wanted the rest of app to also be available in those same languages if they user was in their respective locale. Therefore, the second part of this update was to translate the entire app, so now we can fully say ezInvoices supports mulitple languages! I will be sharing another blog about how I did this, so if you are Shopify App Developer yourself and looking to translate, localize, and international your app you will want to check that out. The second feature ezInvoices shipped was the Feedback feature. I am pretty excited about this addition. To be honest, I am not even sure if it is allowed, but I'll be sure to update this if it ends up breaking Shopify App TOS. What is the Feedback feature? The idea was I wanted to ask my app user's what exactly they wanted out of app or what they might think is lacking. Initially, after a company would download ezInvoices, I would get the store's email and shoot them an email (I know ew, cold marketing), but I thought of it more of a warm email approach. Essentially, I introduced myself, thanked them for downloading ezInvoices, and asked them if there was anything they needed help with or expected to see a different feature/functionality. Then, they would never hear from me again (Not a fan of spamming people). I never received a single reply. Whether they went into their spam or simply ignored it (like I would do), I just wasn't getting feedback on my app. I have a bunch of ideas I want to include in the app, and eventually will get to them, but honestly I have other projects that I tend to. Baking the feedback survey directly within the app seemed like a good approach, so that's what I did. I created a route that the user would visit. It asks a multiple choice question on which of the following features you would like to see most, and when selected it will ask the user a follow-up question. I save their response in my database, and can see the results. Once the user answers a question, then the questions go away, and it's essentially a blank screen that says something like, "Thank you for your feedback! Check back for more development questions". I will also be writing a post on how you can set this up in your own app (provided I don't find out it's against Shopify app terms)!

Enjoy the the new features and let me know (through the app) what you think ;)

  • Jonathan