Building My Own Shopify Dashboard and Internal Tools

April 6, 2026

I really believe that in-house tools are the future of scaling your business.

Recently I’ve been working on new internal tools for Invisible Building. I've been building stuff to make my day to day a bit smoother, a bit more craic a bit more vibes.

I run a solo independent Shopify studio based in the North of Ireland (Northern Ireland). We (as a company), work across Ireland, UK, USA and with anyone with an interest in Shopify.

When I started building this dashboard, it started as a bit of an experiment to see how and what I can do with the Shopify API. But what I've built has turned into something I’m using every day and I visualise that every IB PRO customer will have this set up going forward..

IB Pro is something coming very soon not many of you read this so if you're one of the lucky ones you'' get the insight first!

Watch the walk through

I uploaded a video walk through very high level, give it a watch!

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS8HcX8HNzo

Why I built this

Shopify is class for getting content live and running a store, but the actual writing and updating side can feel a bit slow at times.

One thing in particular that would do my head a bit on a daily occurrence with Shopify is how poor the blogging platform looks from the writers perspective. When you’re trying to blog more, update pages, and keep things moving, it can break your flow. If you're into how things look and feel to the level I am. It's just not as beautiful to use when compared to Medium.com and it's not as minimal as Blogger in... and dare I say it. Wordpress is... better...

So, anyway. I wanted to build something new. Made fresh for me to use.

Ultimately, I wanted something quicker. Something that lets me update the site without jumping through loads of steps and that led me to experiment with the Shopify API.

Using the Shopify API

I started working with the Shopify API which lets you update your store without going through the admin panel.

I built a local app on my machine using Node.js. It pulls in everything from the site and lets me edit it directly.

Inside it I can manage:

Blog posts
Case studies
Events
Testimonials
Products and pages

If I make a change and hit save, it updates live. No logging in. No distractions. All vibes.

Events agus blogging more often!

One thing I’ve been trying to do more of is to work more in public and document what I’m doing. 2025 was about getting into the habit of blogging. This year is about improving it.

I’ve added an events section to the Invisible Building website as well. Anytime I’m going to something, I put it up on the site. What the event is, why I’m going, and if others can join.

In the video I mention I was heading down to Dublin soon for an Irish speaking hackathon. Coders, creatives, ceol, the whole thing. That mix of tech and culture is something I want to lean into more. I'm now back from it and absolutely loved it. More on what we built soon.

RSS and staying focused

Another thing I’ve built into this is an RSS feed.

Instead of scrolling social media, I pull in content from sites I actually care about and read it inside my own dashboard.

No ads. No recommended videos. No doom scroll. No... Brain rot?

Maybe anyway lol. I added the ability to start stuff so I can go back and watch it.

I’ve started doing the same with YouTube too. Just watching what I choose to watch.

Where this could go

I really think having way to use the Shopify API is the way forward for developers. It means I can work fast. Build fast and ship fast. A simple dashboard for clients where they can update their site quickly without needing to log into Shopify. Could be the future. Next steps would be working out how to safety log into it on external machines...