Shopify Migration

Product customisation 

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 colours. 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. We did have to be especially careful to not impact Konditor’s SEO, as product variants are not naturally indexed by search engines from Shopify.

A custom shipping app

The delivery app was arguably a larger undertaking than the migration itself, as the number of options and moving parts can not be understated. 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 said order 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 in the future new products became available for nationwide delivery, they could easily make changes.

New opportunities

We conducted a core SEO audit for the brand to discover where improvements could be made, if they could. While the brand may have had some minor shortcomings in the form of headings not formatted as H1s across a couple of pages, their SEO was strong for the most part, so we needed to ensure that it was protected and maintained.

For example, their previous site ranked highly for the search term “London Same Day Delivery” largely because they had an entire page dedicated to it. This was the case for a number of pages and we ensured that some version of these pages were rebuilt on the new store. As mentioned previously though, Shopify has a very specific URL structure, and so some pages could not use the same URL that they had done previously. We made doubly certain that each of these old URLs redirected to the new Shopify URL in order for their ranking to be maintained.

Finally, we implemented some new design features to make the site reflect the quirky nature of Konditors 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.