Urban Home launched a new B2C online store

Urban Home, a home furnishing and furniture online store targeting private buyers, has launched a new website on the Hungarian market, which is designed to be similar to the online platform of the Spanish furniture manufacturer Kave Home. To serve its customers, it chose the Shopify e-commerce site. During the development of the web store, LogiNet implemented slight modifications to cover specific customer needs.

History

LogiNet was approached by Ékes Konyha Kft. at the end of 2023 to help them create a B2C ecommerce site for their furniture store. The Urban Home store distributes products of the Spanish furniture manufacturer Kave Home in Hungary.

Objectives

As it was a new online store project, it was not necessary to transfer functionalities and elements from the previous web store.

The company did not have an ERP system in use, which made it easier to deal with any integration issues that might arise. The company already had a contracted payment partner, while delivery was handled in-house.

During the development, the client requested that, as a contracted Kave Home partner, the new online interface should reflect the look and functionality of the Spanish store. After examining the Spanish e-commerce site, it quickly became clear that a Shopify e-commerce platform would be the simplest solution.

During the project, it was a priority to ensure that the digital interface to be developed would follow the look and feel of the Spanish online store as closely as possible. To this end, the Spanish company supplied us with the design elements and Urban Home also created its design elements, closely following those of the partner company.

Solution

The Shopify platform provided the right answer to the customer's needs, but LogiNet had to find a solution for some specific situations.

Design

For Urban Home, the design of the online interface was essential. We sent the client the Shopify Theme Store, where they selected the theme they felt most resembled the Spanish online store and we then further formatted it.

Product information

Urban Home receives its products directly from the Spanish partner in the form of files sent to them. As soon as a new product arrives, it needs to be imported into the Shopify interface each time.

Regarding the product database we received, it soon became clear that not all information could be inserted into the product data structure provided by Shopify. Indeed, each product had at least 30 pieces of product information that needed to be displayed in the Urban Home online interface.

In the Shopify platform, it was therefore essential to create additional metafield-type fields to store this data. These metafields are customizable data fields with a free key that can be referenced later, anywhere in the webshop interface.
We have provided a solution for synchronizing the extra information, as by default, when synchronizing from files, metafield-type fields are not synchronized within Shopify.

With the implemented synchronisation, the metafield data can be synchronised with the uploaded products and immediately appear on the product data sheets.

Product variants

For products sold by Urban Home, due to their nature, multiple variants are available for one product type (e.g. different furniture materials, and colours). Shopify includes variant management by default, but the metafield type data with extra information changes per variant and is listed as a separate product in the original product database without being merged. For this reason, variant reassembly was implemented using an alternative method: the individual data for each variant was retained and existed as separate products, but the relationship between each variant was preserved.

Individual code fragments

During the development of the online store, we implemented additional minor functionalities, which included.

• Consumer-friendly integration with Shopify.
• Conditional display/hide of items depending on the product.
• Tax number filling option within Shopify.
• Multilingual frontend.