Development

Development Professionals

In today’s world, selling online is no longer a nice to have its an absolute necessity. Running a business is tough work, you need a great product, a strong team, and most of all professional partners that can help you grow. Ambaum partners with more than 30 brands selling one million a year online to provide development strategy, coding and testing.

At our core we are a team of Project Managers and Developers that understand ecommerce development. Ambaum has been an official Shopify Plus Partner for more than 4 years and specializes in programming for Shopify merchants. Ambaum also supports WordPress and WooCommerce, we have many brands that want the benefit of the WordPress CMS to support their content marketing.

We are Shopify Experts that partner all the leading technology companies in the Shopify ecosystem. We can help with recommendations to power your: email, shipping, product reviews, filtering, product configurators, shoppable quizzes, subscriptions and much more!

Shopify Maintenance Partner

Ambaum provides ongoing support and maintenance for Shopify merchants that are looking for a professional development firm. We function as your outsourced development team offering strategy on which apps to choose, when to custom build features and how to get the most out of your Shopify theme. If you would like support for your Shopify store, reach out for a chat, we’d love to meet you!

Ambaum specializes in the following 4 areas of Shopify development:

Shopify Theme Development

Ambaum will custom code your fully responsive desktop and mobile design into a new custom theme for your site. Ambaum will develop your new Shopify Plus site on top of Shopify Theme Kit. We have built a proprietary custom theme that includes a lot of pre-built sections, snippets, scripts, icons, and much more. Our starter theme gives you the benefits of a professional theme and you also get the flexibility of building everything from the ground up to fully accommodate the look and feel of your new store. When we design and build a new theme it typically includes the following pages:

• Home
• Collection
• Product Detail
• About Us
• Blog
• Cart
• Forms
• Static Text Template Page
• Mega Nav

We will custom code liquid template files in the new theme as well as use JavaScript where necessary to create a completely unique site. All Shopify development will be done in a Shopify theme and merchants will have access to view our development process real time.

Integrations

Building an ecommerce store is a big step in the evolution of a brand, but as you grow you also need to connect other third-party systems. We have worked with all different types of API’s and can help you scope out creating the connector you need, some of the typical questions we ask to evaluate the scope of an integration:

• Does the 3rd party system have an API?
• Is there documentation around the API?
• Have other Shopify stores integrated with this 3rd party system before?
• Does the merchant need us to host the connector or will the merchant host it?

The first thing we will ask is if there is a 3rd party connector that already exists that will work for the integration. Philosophically we will not look to build a custom connector if there is already a connector service that is a good fit for the merchant.

Other variables that will impact the complexity of the integration include:

• How many services are connecting to Shopify through the connector
• Volume of data
• Number of fields and Shopify API that will be accessed
• Error handling
• Frequency of API calls

It is important to note that all connectors need to live off Shopify on a separate server and rely on the Shopify APIs for connectivity.

Migrations

If you are looking to move to Shopify you will need a partner to migrate your data from your old platform. Ambaum can help you move the following data:

• Products
• Orders
• Customers
• Collections
• Product Reviews
• 301 redirects
• Content
• Blogs
• Pages
• Email list mirgrations

Data migrations can be messy and we’ve faced many of the challenges head on. Often there are data integrity issues, incomplete fields and getting the data mapping correct is critical, learn more about some of common data migration best practices here

How much time does it take to migrate data? It depends on volume of data, complexity of data, the platform, the number of sub collections, the data integrity, how much historical data do you need migrated. Migrating the data is maybe 1/3 the work, restructuring the data is another big part, but there is also migrating pages, page templates, blog information, and more that make up the rest of the effort.

Shopify Custom Apps

Shopify has a robust app store that will allow you to extend the functionality of your store to add many rich features. However there are certain instances where you will want very custom functionality on your site and the way to handle that is by building a Shopify custom app just for your brand. Here is an example custom app we built for our client Inside Weather:

Inside Weather had their own technology team and we jointly approached scoping this custom app for their website. Inside Weather’s team was going to handle the creation and storage of millions of images and create an API that Ambaum could access for the configurator. Ambaum was responsible for accessing the API and creating a clean front end product configurator experience, here is a live example for building your own sofa. We built the majority of the front-end experience in Vue, but also worked extensively in the Shopify Liquid theme. You are able to rotate the furniture on the fly, see your colors update, zoom in and out and save your customizations for purchase, this custom app increased customer engagement with the site dramatically.

The most custom apps are product configurators, but we have also built deep POS integrations, custom shipping apps and much more. If you have an idea for a custom app for your store, connect with us and we will help you scope the project out.