The Background

This one was a big deal for us. Ruairi has been a software developer since about 1998 and in that time he has worked with everyone from An Garda Siochána to Microsoft. He has developed e-commerce solutions for one woman work from home micro businesses to multinationals handling billions of euro in transactions every night. The problem with hardcore software development is that it is hard to sell. If a company has a problem, then often bespoke software will solve it. But how do you get yourself in front of the company at the right time? Our answer was to use Shopify.

By pitching ourselves as Shopify developers we managed to “intercept” any traffic on the internet that was looking for “e-commerce solutions”, “selling online”, “inventory management”, etc. And we love Shopify, so we continued to take on the smaller businesses and the straightforward Shopify sites. But really, we always have our eye on the client to whom we can offer exceptional technical expertise that sets us apart from the competition. Those clients don’t come along every day, but when they do they consume our time, push us to our limits technically, and contribute nicely to the bottom line. If Shopify is our buttermilk, then software development clients are our whiskey on a Sunday.

• Obscure Reference Alert

  Whiskey on a Sunday is a great trad folk song about a man who drinks buttermilk all the week, whiskey on a Sunday. Listen

  Whiskey on a Sunday is also the name of the proof of concept Shopify website we quickly built to test this software for Irish Whiskey Hub. View (password: whiskey)

The Requirement

Irish Whiskey Hub approached us because they had heard about the work we did for Mitchell and Son, and they knew we knew our Shopify onions. They needed a solution that allowed them to integrate with 20 or more of their clients that they manage whiskey fulfilment for. The brief involved sending data back and forth between Shopify websites, integrating with 3rd party APIs, and providing centrally maintained shipping costs to customers of their many different clients. Essentially what they wanted was for a customer on the Mitchell and Son website (and the rest) to see shipping rates provided by Irish Whiskey Hub at the point of checkout. Then when they placed the order a copy of it would go to Irish Whiskey Hub so that they could fulfil the order. Any shipping and tracking details entered by Irish Whiskey Hub would be send back to the Mitchell and Son website and it would update the client.

The Solution

We spend over 80 hours testing various solutions to the problem. We tried commercial warehousing solutions such as ShipBob and ShipHero. We found they imposed a way of working that is inflexible and expensive. We tried ERP systems such as Odoo, Netsuite, and Brightpearl. They were very bloated and very expensive and seemed like they might be a lifetime of trouble for Irish Whiskey Hub. In the end we specified a mixture of our own bespoke Shopify app developed in Microsoft .Net as well as some nifty importing and exporting of data using the brilliant Shopify app Matrixify.

The Outcome

This was probably one of the first projects we worked on where our deep technical software development ability and our domain knowledge of Shopify came together in a beautiful symmetry. It 100% justified our approach to finding business and to us it feels like a sweet spot.

And for Irish Whiskey Hub? They now have a solution that can scale with them from 20 to 200 clients, they have eliminated manual data entry, and they are providing a much better experience for their own clients.