Apps in admin

The Shopify admin is where users configure their stores and manage their businesses. Integrating your app with the admin gives users functionality that feels familiar and can be easily found.

This guide explains the different ways that you can integrate your app with the Shopify admin.

Embedded app home

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The primary place where users engage with your app is its embedded app home. This is the location where merchants are directed when they navigate to your app in Shopify.

The Shopify admin provides a surface for apps to render the UX for their embedded app home. On the web, the surface is an iframe and in the Shopify mobile app, the surface is a WebView.

A diagram that shows the Shopify admin. The screenshot highlights an embedded app home. The app navigation is rendered directly in the Shopify admin navigation.

By combining Shopify App Bridge and Polaris, you can make your app display seamlessly in the Shopify admin. Polaris enables apps to match the visual appearance of the admin by using the same design components. App Bridge enables apps to communicate with the Shopify admin and create UI elements outside of the app's surface. Such elements include navigation menus, modals that cover the entire screen, and contextual save bars that prevent users from navigating away from the page when they have unsaved changes.

When you're building your embedded app home, follow the App Design Guidelines and the admin performance best practices to ensure that you create a great experience for users.

Admin actions

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Admin action extensions enable your app to embed transactional workflows that display as modals. These actions let users interact with your app directly from key pages of the Shopify admin, such as the Products, Customers, and Orders pages. You can also create actions that become available when users select multiple resources in an index table, for example, selecting multiple products on the Products index page.

An example action extension displaying as a modal on the Products page of the Shopify admin, with fields for merchants to input data.

Admin print actions

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Admin print actions extensions are a special form of action extension designed to let your app print documents from key pages in the Shopify admin. Unlike a typical admin action extension, these extensions are found under the Print menu on orders and product pages. Additionally, they contain special APIs to let your app display a preview of a document and print it.

An example admin print action extension.

Admin blocks

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Admin block extensions let your app embed contextual experiences that display as cards on key pages of the admin, such as the Products, Customers, and Orders pages. Blocks enable your app to persistently display relevant information to users. They also let users edit your app's data and other product data. After the admin block extensions are built and deployed, users have the option to add your app's block to resource pages and edit its location on the pages.

Admin links

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Admin link extensions create links from resource pages in the Shopify admin to related pages of your app. You should use them sparingly because they have the potential to disrupt user workflows with slow, full-page navigations.