When teams look for ways to automate workflows or improve business processes, a common question arises: Should we write a script or build an app? Both can interact with the same APIs, solve similar problems, and save time—but choosing the wrong approach can create extra maintenance work or make a solution harder for teams to use effectively.

This post explains the difference between scripts and apps, when each makes sense, and why a working script doesn’t automatically simplify app development.

Understand when to write a script and when to build an app

For many B2B companies, offering credit is crucial for building strong customer relationships and driving sales. However, managing credit limits manually is risky. Without an automated system, customers can easily exceed their allowed credit, creating financial exposure for your business.

Shopify does not offer a native solution to automatically track a company’s available credit or prevent orders that exceed it. This forces manual reconciliation, leads to potential overspending, and increases the risk of late payments.

The ideal solution is a dynamic system that tracks each company’s credit usage, enforces limits during checkout, and automatically restores credit when invoices are paid. This protects your business from credit overextension while ensuring a smooth ordering experience for your B2B customers.

Implement Shopify B2B Company Credit Limits using Shopify Flow

The term “headless” is increasingly capturing the attention of e-commerce business owners and decision-makers—but the buzz can be dangerous when the underlying context isn’t well understood.

Too often, sales teams promote headless solutions without a clear grasp of what native platforms already provide, leading companies to commit to costly, over-engineered builds they never needed. I’ve seen even CTO-level leaders make decisions they later regret, realizing only after launch that headless added unnecessary complexity and expense. Slick sales pitches can make headless seem essential when it isn’t.

Unpack the myths before choosing a headless architecture

BigCommerce offers an Open Source Checkout app and an Open Source B2B Buyer Portal app. By default, merchants benefit from a maintained and supported version of these apps, providing a robust out-of-the-box SaaS experience. However, both apps can be forked and customized to meet specific business requirements. This flexibility is powerful—but it comes at a cost.

Discover the trade-offs of customizing BigCommerce checkout and buyer portal

Client-side JavaScript runs in the user’s browser, which makes it inherently unreliable for enforcing critical functionality. Network issues, browser quirks, or code errors can prevent scripts from executing correctly, leading to unexpected or inconsistent behavior. Additionally, client-side code is fully exposed to users, which creates potential security risks.

Understand the risks and limitations of client-side JavaScript