The Apiece Apart website runs on Shopify. As a Certified Shopify Partner, Activated Studio loves Shopify and appreciates what it does best:
- manage products and variants
- process orders reliably and effectively at scale
- integrated fulfillment and inventory management
However, what if you want a beautiful, fast, easy to manage, composable, fully-content-managed front-end with clean code? Even Shopify recommends you go headless, which is our specialty at Activated Studio.
What does it mean to go headless?
It means the front end is built as a separate application outside of Shopify and connects via API to your Shopify store. We are using a React based front end with Next JS. The checkout process still happens on Shopify using a subdomain. For example, the Apiece Apart checkout experience happens at shop.apieceapart.com.
Why go headless?
- Page speed: What is the best possible user experience for an ecommerce store? Besides the obvious, it better be fast! When you go headless, you are leveraging the architecture of the world’s best and fastest website applications.
- Security: Simply put, security is maxed out when you go headless. There’s nothing to hack, it’s just HTML, CSS, Javascript, and API calls.
- SEO: The front end code is extremely clean, creating the best possible output for search engines.
- Compos-ability: This is industry jargon for ‘create custom landing pages where you can add display components in whatever order you want to, including product variants‘.
Storytelling and Cross Selling: Shopify With Drupal
Apiece Apart founders love the talented, clever, self-starting, real women that wear their clothes. They celebrate them by telling their original stories on the website. They invest in high-end photography. Showing how women layer Apiece Apart building blocks into their personal wardrobe and daily life is a marketing priority.
They publish original magazine-like interviews in the ‘Stories’ section of the website. Their popular Woman series explores ‘long-form conversations with women from around the world.”
Syncing Products from Shopify into the CMS
It works like this:
- The Shopify subscription maintains all product data. Product data means pricing, inventory, product images, product description, tags, etc.
- Products and product data get automatically synced into the CMS as components, so long as it’s active and added to the Sales Channel for our custom application.
- Color, Material, and Size data are structured as smart filters in the Shop section.
- Each shop section can be manually sorted for merchandising purposes.
- All data is structured for search and consumed into an Algolia search index, for a great on site search experience.
- When customers want to check out, they enter Shopify’s checkout workflow.
- All order processing, fulfillment, shipping, inventory and all store-related features happen in Shopify.
