We were tasked with creating an e-commerce website in a pretty short timeframe to capitalize on a new marketing avenue for an office supply company. The concept was to create customized "Back-to-School kits" that were specific to each school in the target area, and for each grade - as determined by the school's provided list of required and recommended school supplies.

This project turned into a smashing success, resulting in a lot more sales than expected, both in order quantity and average order amount.

Our client had a very clear vision for how they wanted the customer to be able to find and order the kits for their child, as well as additional recommended products as add-ons. This made it easy for us to lay out the customer experience, but it also meant that we would have to do some custom development and edit the Shopify code.

Shopify is a very powerful platform, one that we really enjoy working with, and it comes with a decent amount of customization options standard. Their themes also offer a good variety of styles to choose from. The customization options do have their limitations though, and we knew we would have to make some changes to the code in order to give our client the exact customer experience they wanted.

• We edited the Liquid code to give specific recommended products per school category, both on the school's "collection" page as well as in each product in that "collection".
• We also edited the code to organize the schools in an easy to navigate list that would only display products for that school category.

Making these custom changes to the Shopify code gave our client exactly what they were looking for, and made it a much easier purchasing experience for their customers.

Shopify orders items into what they call "Collections", which you would probably think of as categories. While the standard Collections structure would usually work for most stores, our client wanted only items required/recommended by the school to appear once they had selected that school or were browsing kits for that school. This required some strategic planning on how to structure the Collections, as well as custom code to display them correctly.

Recommended items was the trickiest part, as Shopify's default handling of recommended items shows all items in the store. This default is not customizable without custom code editing. We edited the code to only show recommended products for each school collection.

As part of our client's service to their customers for this project, there were specific requirements for how orders had to be placed so that they could be properly fulfilled. Any kits ordered would be delivered to school by day one, each identified with the child's name. In order to ensure that each kit was attached to a child's name, we made it so that each kit could only be added to the cart one at a time, and added a custom field that required the parent to enter their child's name for each kit.

Once we had the site structure and design completed, we also assisted with populating the store with all the products and created product images for our client. Everything was done for them, all they had to do was log in and start receiving orders!

The site went live, and with help from direct marketing by the client, 224 orders were made in only 18 days.

The store is now closed, as they only took orders for a short time before the school year started. They are already planning for next year with a bright outlook for their success again in 2021.

This project was a lot of fun for us, and challenged us to think creatively about how to structure the site and the products to get the expected end result. We were also very proud to watch the orders roll in, with only one order needing adjustment. We knew that we had created the best possible ordering experience for their customers, making it clear and easy. Every order was successfully fulfilled. We're very happy for our clients to have exceeded their sales expectations, and we look forward to working with them again next year.

The Back-to-School Kits website is currently password protected to keep anyone from making an order outside of their fulfillment time. If you would like to take a look at the full website, simply contact us and we can provide you with the password.

I have worked with Kristina on a number of design and web content projects and I have always appreciated the quality of her work, attention to detail and strong creative content. She is responsive, efficient and a great communicator

Neil Hodgson

General Manager

The Back-to-School Kits website is currently password protected to keep anyone from making an order outside of their fulfillment time. If you would like to take a look at the full website, simply contact us and we can provide you with the password. If you've been thinking about setting up an online store for your business, we'd love to chat with you about the possibilities! Contact us and we will be happy to listen.