We’ve been a Shopify Partner for a while now. We have been honing our skills and integrating business systems with Shopify to fully understand the challenges facing our customers. We have created new solutions to address many of these issues.
One of the first integrations we did was to put xTuple configured items on a Shopify storefront. This was a challenge. This brought us quickly into the world of options and variants and all of the limitations that go with them. We learned how to work with the limitations and then how to make the storefront a pleasant experience with configured products.
Yes, we used the iconic STOCKCAR1 and the toys database for much of our testing.
This might seem simple to those not familiar with Shopify. Shopify provides Options that can be used to add pricing for various configurations of a product. Matching this up with the configured options in an ERP system can be tricky. Our utilities read the configured options and related Bills of Materials to then create the liquid code for each product page. The drop-downs will then display the option price and the product price will update as selections are made.
The pricing reflects the chosen options.
When a user selects the different options, the price changes and is passed through to the cart. The order can then be imported into the awaiting ERP system for fulfillment.
The pricing is updated as options are chosen.
Ok, not bad. Wait, I said that Shopify only allows 3 options. The demo data in xTuple only has 3 options on this toy truck. We went ahead and added a couple more options. You can now see that we are handling 5 priced options.
Standard Shopify handles 3 options, but you shouldn’t be limited.
We are doing some very exciting stuff. This is the stuff that makes it fun to come to work each day. If you are looking to enhance your online presence, or simply trying to import the orders that are already coming into your website, reach out to us.