BEYOND CLICK-TO-BUY - A CUSTOM GIFT BOX EXPERIENCE | CYBERJAMMIES

The primary challenge actually had nothing to do with the website; it was simply figuring out what combination of products would fit in which box. After all, there were three gift boxes for customers to choose from, a small standard gift box, a large standard gift box, and a luxury gift box, each with a predetermined “height” value. 

From here we identified a number of different hurdles that we would have to overcome:

1. Fulfilment centres needed to understand what products made up each order, and what products were actually included in a gift box and not. 

2. Customers needed to be able to  easily build, personalise, and edit a gift box without confusion.

3. The functionality needed to be just as easy for Cyberjammies to manage if and when they needed to make changes in the future. 

Here’s how we got over each challenge…

That initial hurdle of determining product sizes was relatively simple to overcome. Cyberjammies were extremely accommodating, and went through the arduous process of measuring the “height” of each product once it was folded. This “height” statistic was then listed against each product in the back end of Shopify, as was the height of the three gift boxes. This allowed us to compare the combined height of selected products with the gift box height and display to the customer whether their selection would fit.

Those subsequent challenges were a bit harder to manage, but we did overcome them.

Firstly, the process of accurately relaying to the fulfilment centres how an order was to be structured if it contained a gift box was quite a complex challenge in and of itself. But we also had to ensure we could accurately relay this info whilst working through the channels of Cyberjammies’ existing tech stack. All orders would pull through to their retail operating system, Brightpearl, and from there into their fulfilment system, Synergy, which is what staff would use to know what products went into what order. 

The main issue was that, once an order was in Brightpearl we had no control over it. So, we needed to ensure that an order entered into Brightpearl in the correct format so that Synergy would understand it correctly. Firstly, every gift box would get assigned with the associated variant ID’s of the products within the gift box, which was also useful for displaying to customers which products were in what gift boxes when they were checking out on the site. From here, orders were translated into code before going into Brightpearl. Once Synergy pulled that code from Brightpearl, it would display the order in such a way that the staff working at the fulfilment centres could pack the orders correctly.

The challenges of visually relaying everything to the customer was more of a UI design and customer usability challenge.. We worked with our design team to ensure that everything made sense, with Cyberjammies keeping a handle on the messaging. This also brought with it the challenge of letting people edit the gift box once it was in the cart. We knew that an edit functionality was essential to not frustrate customers. We eventually built out an “edit box” option that took customers back to the gift box selection tab. Here, they could reassign which products in the cart would be contained within the gift box, or take products out of a gift box and have them just be bought separately. Again, the gift box would then indicate whether or not the chosen combination of products would fit within the height parameters of the box itself. 

Finally, using Shopify’s stylised UI framework, we gave Cyberjammies themselves the ability to edit this functionality from their Shopify customiser page. This allowed them to change messaging or update parameters in the future without development support.