You’d be hardpressed in the world of e-commerce not to have heard of Shopify. Although in 2nd place after Woocommerce for market share, it’s ranked #1 by merchants for usability.
Like with Woocommerce, Magento or any of the commercial e-commerce platforms, Shopify operated on a template framework to make it easy for anyone to set up their e-commerce site. The problem with this though, is that no matter how malleable they make their templates, they’re still templates. The best websites are when you identify all of your content requirements and the UX/UI design that’s right for your users, and then build a site that mirrors that. If you’re starting off with the frameworks for a site already, you’re left trying to fit in what you want to what’s available.
One of the key reasons Shopify and it’s competitors are so popular isn’t just their ease of use though, it’s their excellent back end functionality that facilitates the many idiosyncrasies of e-commerce. So how can you get the best of both worlds?
Well, you can manipulate Shopify to create more bespoke sites, providing you have internal or external resources that are really good front end coders. Shopify created their own open source template language called Liquid, which is written in Ruby.
We recently built a site on Shopify for Natalie Marie Jewellery in which we created imagery, navigation and an Instagram style blog page, all of which sat outside of the standard functions of the site.
We will be hosting a session on this at this year’s “A Day With Shopify” event in Melbourne on the 30th November, but if anyone would like to know more about creating bespoke websites to better reflect their brand and make sure they stand out from the crowd, then we’re always happy to chat and share our experiences.
In case you’re interested in any of the other articles we posted today, here they are:
Mumbrella360 download
A few of us attended the conference from 6-8 June. With the overarching theme being emerging tech and what it means for brands, marketers and agencies (basically means be AUTHENTIC!), we've outlined a few of the more exciting sessions we attended here.
Map My Plan Case study
One of our clients won a super cool award! The term 'disruption' gets bandied about a lot these days, but these guys have truly disrupted the Australian Financial Planning market. Read more about how here.