Running an E-commerce shop with flowers and accessories De Duinroos is a well-known name in the region around Beverwijk. To assist a webshop had been built in Shopify and I’ve joined as Front-End Consultant to build upon this.
The webshop
De Duinroos is a physical flower store with a previously built online presence. The presence was split up over multiple different webshops all with their own goal. The original webshop was an accessory store, with high class vases, bowls and trays. There was also a store to sell bouquets and one for funeral flower arrangements. The marketing team behind De Duinroos knew it would be better to offer it all in one shop. Thus came the plan to combine the stores into one.
Combining all stores
The plan was to use the existing accessory store as the main store. Every interaction would come from the established name www.duinroos.nl. This started by bringing all flower products into the store using the Shopify API and a specific bridge API to connect the old store to the main store and back.
To go back we would need specific information that would normally not be available in a Shopify store. This is where I came into play as not only a consultant, but as a developer as well.
Building a front-end
The existing back-end to handle flower orders had specific checkout requirements like a delivery date, but also had the option of adding a wishing card to the order. We decided that it would be best for the user to do one order with all information combined. To do this I built custom blocks that would interact with the shopify ‘add-to-cart’ form.
Technical
Shopify Blocks
Building shops with Shopify has never been easier with a rich built in block editor. This editor consist of blocks published by the theme author but is extendable with apps. De Duinroos now works with a few custom apps to provide blocks to to the marketing team so they can create store pages and landing pages without any difficulty.
Taking over the theme support
The initial setup was startup like. This meant every move had to be made as fast as possible with the least amount of friction. This resulted in a bought theme for the store so updates would be taken care of. But since pre-built themes do not always fit your design, or are a 100% match with the idea you have, customizations had been made to the theme which made updating near impossible without losing them.
To get back to updating I’ve taken up the theme support and now host this theme in a private GitHub repo to give me the opportunity to keep extending on the theme, but I can also handle updates to the theme with the ability to roll back.
Shopify has made this easy by offering the ability to use custom GitHub hosted themes where they push the theme changes to and pull repository changes from.