At work I’m currently working on delivering a project to offer online shopping to the public. So 2005 I know but better late than never. In the web world Shopify rings bells so I figured it was a safe bet to experiment for us. One of my favourite companies abookapart uses shopify and having been on the customer stand I feel happy with the platform.
I’ve just attended a half day workshop led by Keir Whitaker from Shopify which was an introduction to the platform with time to have a little dig under the hood. The session gave me the confidence that shopify should meet our immediate needs and longer term needs. The point of sale (POS) rollout in 6-12months is also pretty exciting. I made a few notes:
- Shopify is a theme based e-commerce hosted platform
- you can try out the partnership platform for testing out the entire process and flow for internal stakeholders
- uses an open source template language called liquid
- at present over 110,000 stores
- Shopify uses stripe to handle payments but accepts many other gateways
- examples of great shops included – United pixel workers, Greats brand, Herb Lester
- essential cheatsheet for code snippets
- you can use www.fetchapp.com for handling digital products
- there are new EU rules coming into force in 2015 that need exploring around item returns and digital downloads from 2015
- if you’re a mac user like me you can use their free desktop app to edit themes on your computer
- get used to making shudder for, else, if statements
- one product can have multiple variates e.g. a product is a t-shirt but the sizes are variates
- building a theme consists of HTML, CSS, javascript and the liquid template language
- uses five folders (assets, config, layout, snippets, templates) and 11 core files.
- #shopifyu
I’ll let you know how we get on in July!