Working with Shopify

Shopify came from the need for retailers to set up an online store relatively quickly, learn from their user data and grow their market share. As a platform, it provides everything for non-developers to trade online with very little investment and a huge amount of potential.

It has a huge amount of support and guides you on how to securely and responsibly trade, manage inventory, handle shipping and can even cover point of sale (POS) in physical stores.

The beautifully crafted basic themes are free and customisable, allowing you to create your online presence with your own unique branding.

The 8000+ Shopify apps allow you to adapt your shop. There is an app for almost every requirement:

• social media integrations
• tapping into sales channels
• customising store design
• managing ordering and shipping
• marketing and conversion

Do you need a developer to customise a Shopify store?

Shopify, whilst easy enough to get up and running is not infinitely customisable, and even with the range of apps there are cases where some development is required. People in this space are normally referred to as Shopify Experts; designers, developers and consultants who have a deep understanding of the Shopify ecosystem and Shopify's Liquid templating language.

We started working with Shopify when an existing client reached out for support with their BidJS plugin, looking for better integration with their Shopify store as it was clunky and disjointed.

What customisations were carried out?

Our client knew the features they wanted to help their clients get the most from their existing site and wasn't sure if the necessary customisations were possible.

Given the problems they were trying to solve, we explored the App marketplace but found there wasn't quite the right solution available. We started working with the client to customise their store around their online auction whilst still being able to market their online store.

This required:

• Adjustments to their bespoke theme, ensure the site was both on-brand and accessible to all users
• Customise the BidJS auction to reflect the new branding and create a seamless user experience when navigating between the shop and auction
• Restructure the collections pages to improve the showcase for products across the store

Perhaps you need a new store?

The requirements of online selling are huge, and whilst the benefit of Shopify is that guides you throughout the process however that still comes at a huge cost to small businesses, time.

Time is critical for lots of new businesses. They need someone to take the task on, to confidently navigate the steps, making the process efficient and without risk of critical issues.

We have recently worked with a client who was in the process of starting out on their e-commerce journey. They had tried using a WooCommerce store within their WordPress site but due to the complexity of their product offering, performance was impacted heavily. When we initially reviewed their site, the homepage had a site load time of 45+ seconds (on a wired, ultrafast fibre broadband connection, so quadruple that for mobile data users), making users abandon their journey instead of converting.

Our very first recommendation was to move the inventory and content over from WordPress to Shopify. The process of setting the store up once the product template had been configured was perhaps the most complex. We simplified the possible options into the 3 categories depending on the level of build most clients had requested in the past.

From there, the aim was to get trading ASAP to gather data to determine how to adjust the design, add or remove features, or remap the user journey.

The speed benefit alone has gone from 45+ seconds down to 0.8 seconds which is a massive improvement.