Team
Senior Developer, 2 Mid-Level Full Stack Developers, Team Lead, Project Manager, Account Manager
Technologies
CakePHP, MySQL, jQuery, Native JavaScript, Shopify REST API, Shopify GraphQL API, HTML5, SCSS, Shopify Theme Liquid, Braintree payments API, Avalara API, Klaviyo API
Time
8 weeks
The task
Madam Glam is a New York City based beauty brand that specializes in professional gel polishes with a focus on vegan and cruelty-free products. We replatformed the business to Shopify, and implemented quite specific customer tier functionality during the migration.
At that time, there were certain platform restrictions that made this task quite tough, so during the development we faced two main challenges:
By default, there was no functionality on Shopify that would allow charging different groups of customers different prices for the same product within one store.
Shopify has its own checkout, which is safe and easy to use, but at that time it didn’t provide a subscription functionality. As the VIP membership required an automatically charged regular fee, the standard Shopify checkout couldn’t be used for it.
Shopify has recently introduced its own solution for subscription payments, making the platform even more functional and comfortable to work with. However, as the key required functionality wasn’t available out-of-the-box at that time, creating a custom app was the only way to go.
Inside the store, customers are divided into two groups: the so-called “Pay-as-you-go” customers who make single purchases on regular terms, and the VIP members. When a customer becomes a VIP, a certain fee is automatically charged from their card once a month, and they are given access to additional sales, promotions, and other benefits, such as free delivery within the United States.
The price difference between the two customers’ plans is set as a percentage and is shown for all products to motivate regular customers to subscribe to VIP membership. The value of the discount and a variety of other options are set up in the admin panel, and can be changed at any time with just a couple of clicks.
The standard Shopify checkout can be used only for one-time payments, so we needed to develop a specific checkout outside of Shopify for the VIP subscription. Either Braintree payment gateway or Stripe could be used in this case, but the client opted for Braintree because at that time it was a better fit from the business’s point of view.
Now, if the customer wants to simply buy a product without the discount and the membership, they are redirected to the regular Shopify checkout. And if they choose the option “Discounted product + VIP membership”, they complete the first payment in the Braintree checkout (and all the others are done with the standard Shopify one).
We designed different scenarios for cases when, for example, a customer’s credit card is maxed during an active VIP membership, and provided the customers with the ability to pause the payments for a certain amount of time, but still enjoy all the benefits of the membership. All this made the app very flexible and easily customisable according to the client’s current business needs.
How you can benefit
Replatforming is a tricky process with very many details to consider. Check out our Migration to Shopify page to see everything that needs to be taken care of to migrate a business safely.
The app’s functionality allows exporting the entire range of data about a customer’s activity within the store, for example:
All data is exported as a CSV file, so it’s easy to create detailed Excel comparison charts to track the profits that were received for a certain period of time and monitor the effectiveness of all kinds of marketing campaigns.
It’s also possible to set different discounts for different groups of products. In the current version of the app, this functionality is not used since the standard 50% discount for VIPs is applied to all products, but any discount can be easily configured in the admin panel of the theme as necessary.
Currently, within the Madam Glam online store, there are only two groups of customers, but this number can be extended with little development work. So, for example, it’s possible to easily create a Super VIP membership with its own set of perks and bonuses in addition to the two already existing customer groups.
With the custom app we built, our client and their customers enjoyed the customer tier functionality that made the Madam Glam user experience so unique. And, as nothing describes our work better than the feedback of our clients, check out what they say about working with us:
“We selected SpurIT because they were listed as preferred “Shopify Pro” partners.
We had a few companies in competition and we decided to go with the most professional and competent one. Their aptitude to help scale a business and their empathy to answer all your needs, even the most complicated / complex ones is most impressive.”
For more details, the full review is available on our Clutch profile.
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