Shopify Pre-order Plugin

E-CommerceRetailSmall BusinessesDigital transformation

Client

A Norwegian agency that helps clients to develop e-commerce solutions, asked us to join one of their projects. The aim was to resolve a few issues for a retail industry customer.

Business needs

The agency’s customer faced two business issues: firstly, he regularly lost consumers who were interested in buying online unavailable items and secondly, he wanted to implement generating automatic regular orders. This way end-users didn’t have to make a new order every time, but just were charged when items were delivered. The idea was to create a new feature that would handle end-users, allowing them to book products and subscribe. The solution had to allow collecting customer card details for pre-orders. Then, the pre-order app would charge them later when the product was ready to ship.

Technologies

Shopify API is a tool that helps developers to receive access to data from an online store. Also, it allows developers to manage the data on the Shopify UI and to create a custom solution or a new integration by using REST or GraphQL queries.

Shopify Polaris s a design system for UI creation that fits with Shopify's backend. It includes guidelines about color combinations, content, and UI components, which help build Shopify app UI efficiently.

NodeJS is an open-source runtime environment used for traditional websites, Shopify plugins development, and back-end API services

ReactJS is a library for UI creation based on the components. It enables the development of responsive UI and single-page applications.

PostgreSQL is an open-source SQL database with wide functionality and adaptable search.

Test Framework Mocha is a solid open-source JavaScript framework on Node.js in the browser that provides asynchronous testing.

Solution

Our team analyzed the issues and technologies that could be used for the realization. Thus, we offered to develop a new Shopify plugin from scratch. It enables three major things:

Ordering of subscription-based products
Processing of subscription-based products
Ordering out-of-stock products with delayed payment

Result

Order processing has changed. Now, users can buy and pay for available products using Shopify. Also, they can buy and pay for subscription-based goods — via Stripe or Braintree. The new plugin allows users to buy unavailable products by pre-order and pay for them when they are ready to be shipped. Moreover, we developed a new page that shows a successfully processed user’s order. Now the client doesn’t lose customers and gets more profit.