Here One

Here One took the music world by storm, winning both the Music and Audio Innovation Award as well as SXSW’s Best in Show. With two wireless buds and a smartphone app, listeners can adjust the volume, EQ, and effects of the world around you. Here allows you to personalize every live experience-from an acoustic set to a three-day fest.

Command C and Here One have worked together for years on a few different iterations of the Here One site, but our latest launch highlights some creative solutions to technical challenges we think other Shopify Plus customers might benefit from, too.

This project represents our ability to think and work creatively within Shopify’s limitations. While this project includes many unique (and mostly under the hood) features, the most significant goals addressed native currency and different (backend) SKUs for the same product.

Both goals were accomplished by our team. Note that the solutions we discuss here were only possible because the client is on Shopify Plus.

Automatic Currency Personalization

One of the primary goals of this project was to allow customers to view product prices in their native currency as determined via geolocation or self-selection. From there, we wanted to facilitate a checkout experience that allows users from regions other than the site’s primary distribution region (US and Canada) to maintain awareness of their native currency during checkout and in subsequent order interactions. This presents quite a bit of technical complexity within the Shopify framework.

Constraints
In order to better align with varying global marketing strategies, and ensure that advertised prices match those listed on the site, regardless of region/currency, the client did not want live currency conversion on product prices. Instead, they wanted product prices, if shown in non-USD currencies, to be a static value that they could choose and modify when required.

Line items and order total lines like shipping, tax and discounts should be available for view in the user’s selected currency when possible. This includes Order Success/Status, Order History and Transactional Emails.

Solution
Through a combination of dynamically calculated and stored order attributes and frontend/template logic, we are able to store the line item and order totals prescribed and calculated for the user’s native currency and display those totals to the user in order communications (transactional emails, order history, etc.). This allows the user’s experience to feel as though it is native to his or her selected region+currency throughout.

Automatic Product Personalization

The second key goal was to have the site automatically swap out products for different versions of the same product, based on the user’s assigned location and the shipping address selected during checkout. This is because different regions required different packaging of the same product.

Constraints
Though the store appears to sell only a single product, regulatory and other requirements change depending on where in the world the product is being shipped to. Under the hood, this means that multiple, separate product SKUs must exist, that a user’s selection of shipping address might change the product that they had already added to their cart, and that orders are routed to the appropriate warehouse based on region/SKU.

Solution
Users are shown the product that matches their geolocated or self-selected region+currency while shopping. When the user selects a shipping address, if the SKUs in the cart do not match the region+currency dictated by the shipping address, those products are swapped out for the equivalent SKUs that correspond to the new region+currency, and the user is returned to the checkout process with proper line item and order totals set.

In conclusion, what seems like a very simple site to the frontend user, is actually quite technically complex on the backend. With our creative workarounds, Here One was able to seamlessly fulfill orders and customer expectations within the limitations of Shopify.