Thanks Adrian
We took exactly the same angle - a big investment in an integrated
online shop without knowing if there is actually any desire to buy stuff
seemed / seems a foolish thing. Shopify is such a nice, well-known and
easy to use system, and their templating makes it relatively easy to
mimic the look and feel of an existing site fairly easily.
Initially, we were just going to setup Shopify and then send people off
there - so, to http://shop.handelhendrix.org. I'm not hugely comfortable
with this though - as previously ranted when it comes to collections
"integration" I think a 3rd party site is rarely "integrated". Stats are
harder, look and feel is always a bit "off" and if you change anything
like menu items it has to change in more than one place...etc.
There are places it can't be avoided - so the ticketing on HH for
instance is done via SeeTickets - which is a 3rd party, albeit one where
they've made a really good effort to make the site look the same - AND
have the wherewithal to allow Google Analytics embeds etc. So the
tracking is really good and we can actually set up proper goals and so on.
But... when we started looking into the integration we realised that
Shopify have a "buy button" embed option. Although this is built for
single products, it's actually really quite nice with the basket
integration tab - so we built some code which uses a custom Shopify App
to grab the latest products via their API, build the shop page
dynamically, and then write all the buttons. The only downside is that
the button code is written lots of times to the page - I think when we
have a bit more time we'll probably rewrite this, and may even (again)
produce a WordPress plugin which does the grunt work for this.
Long and short: Shopify is ace, and the investment is small - so you can
stick a toe in the water and see if the gushing enthusiasm is worth
anything rather than investing $$$ in something that people might never
use :-)
Oh - also - we're probably going to head in the POS direction (as per
Zak in Bristol -
http://www.labs.bristolmuseums.org.uk/100-days-of-shopify/) so that's
something to watch out for too..
cheers!
Mike
_____________________________
*Mike Ellis *
Thirty8 Digital: a small but perfectly formed digital
agency:http://thirty8.co.uk <http://thirty8.co.uk/>
* My book: http://heritageweb.co.uk <http://heritageweb.co.uk/> *
Adrian Murphy wrote:
> Looks good!
>
> I'm interested in the Shopify integration. We occasionally get people gushingly enthusiastic about us having an online shop, which we more realistically think won't make any real money (certainly not covering its development costs) so linking to a third party site seems more desirable.
>
> How did that go?
>
> Adrian
>
>
>
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