Maybe I could have been more succinct. Polling the products is useful, what I meant was in terms of an application that converse with shopify it has no use. Sure I can remotely gather a list of products but what I am trying to do is interact with the store. The examples I have seen stipulate that links can be addd to various pages within a shop. I cannot even add the private app to the store.
maybe I am misinterpreting what a private app is. From what I can see a private app is merely a means of accessing the shop's information. To me this is not an app but remote access.
So my question still stands, how does one integrate a private app within a shop? Must I use the shopify ruby client to do so? Must all apps be written in ruby?
The documentation below provides no information whatsoever in how to actually add an app to a shop other than using the app store. I'm sure I must be missing something but I have been around in circles with the documentation and nothing seems to actually explain the mechanism for adding an app to the store. I am simply told how to create authentication details to read/write to the the shop.
http://wiki.shopify.com/Shopify_App_Development
http://wiki.shopify.com/Private_applications
Thanks again.