A CUSTOM BUILT SHIPPING SOLUTION | KONDITOR

Unlike Magento, Shopify is not an open source platform. This means there are some limitations on what you can and can’t do - creating some additional hurdles for us to overcome.

One example is the number of product options you get. Konditor’s products are built to be customisable, and so their existing Magento store gave customers many customisation options, whereas Shopify limits you to only having three customisation options per product, which would not be enough to account for how personalised some of Konditor’s products are designed to be.

The main challenge that we would have to overcome though, was the limitations placed on Konditor’s delivery of their products. Konditor offer three delivery options: London, nationwide, and in-store collection, and wanted to give the customer the choice to choose the best option for them. However, not only do Konditor’s different products have different lead times and delivery limitations, but Konditor’s four brick-and-mortar stores each have their own opening hours, which would dictate whether an order could be fulfilled at all, and whether or not it could be fulfilled in a certain time frame.

For example, certain products, due to their fragility, can only be picked up in one of Konditor’s physical stores, or delivered via London-delivery. So an order containing said product could only be delivered if a customer lived within a certain distance from a store. 

This presented another challenge. Not only does Shopify not allow for you to choose a different pick up or delivery location, there wasn’t a third party app that delivered exactly what we wanted either. And so, it was time to push the boundaries of our web development skills, and build a custom Shopify app from scratch.

Personalised Products Without Limits

Overcoming the product customisation hurdle was as much a customer usability challenge as it was an actual coding one. We first needed to get a handle on what products could be customised in what ways, as certain cakes could be made in a variety of different flavours, and depending on the flavour, you had different options for decorations, which each had a number of different colours to choose from. 

This was set up in a gated system within the product page, meaning that a customer could not select their decoration until they had “gone through the gate” of deciding on the flavour of the cake they wanted, and the same was true for the cake colour. Furthermore, for products where you had the option of including a message or number, say for someone’s 21st birthday, you had the option to input your own message too.

Similarly, by reconfiguring these different variations of a product, as, essentially, their own product, by means of giving each possible flavour, decoration, and colour combination a different SKU (Stock Keeping Unit), but still linking them under the same common denominator, the Shopify store would only need to use different product variants for deciding the product size.

A Bespoke Shipping App, From Scratch

The delivery app was arguably a larger undertaking than the migration itself, due to the number of options and moving parts. The first thing we did was assign each product with a lead time, and placed limitations on the days in the year that each individual product would be available for. This was important, as you had to select your delivery or pick up date, which was of course affected by the lead time and availability throughout the year. So, if a customer tried to order a Valentine’s cake, which has a lead time of 2 days, but with only 1 day left in the availability window, they were unable to check out. 

We also labelled each product with either inclusions or exclusions for postcodes that it could be delivered to. This meant that, if a customer had added a product to their cart, that was only available for London delivery, but the app detected that a non-London postcode had been entered, that customer would be informed that their order could not be fulfilled and asked to make changes. Furthermore, all of this was made extremely easy for Konditor themselves to control. So, if more products became available for nationwide delivery, they could easily make changes.

Finally, we implemented some new design features to make the site reflect the quirky nature of Konditor’s existing branding, and also increase customer usability. One such implementation was a whole stack of new icons for delivery options, allergens, and dietary requirements. For example, if a product contained milk, it now displayed an icon of a cow.