The Baboon team had a legacy Shopify theme experience that was in need of a large overhaul. We took the years of modification and enhancement made via hacking the theme and adding plugins like Shogun to create custom pages and build a new experience from the ground up.
We choose the Hydrogen platform after much deliberation over headless/theme/hybrid. We found the bonuses of having Shopify hosted Oxygen (they're on plus) as well as the in-house support for the new framework meant we'd have additional resources when troubleshooting any parts of the build. While adding multipass I was able to contact Shopify support vs in the past you don't have real access to headless resources on the Shopify chat.
The goal of the build was to enrich every aspect of the experience, allowing for modularity, in-depth resource linking, complex variant structure and editorialized collection pages. While we do sync the Shopify traditional collections we don't actually utilize the Shopify curated products from them. This is because we needed the ability to create collections that showcases specific offerings for specific situations. The client has the ability to return the core product with variants below, split product cards out so every variant color is displayed, return only limited run/core/sale items as well as alternate the model/product image when displaying the products.
Bonus Points
- Bundled PDPs allow customers to add multiple items to cart at the same time
- Specific upsell products fetched after each item is added to cart
- Scheduled themes allow them to change homepages/schedule products to display on certain dates
- (coming soon) Editorial content with complete column rendering to create unique mobile and desktop experiences
- Color referenced in products can fetch related colors across different product verticals creating relationships between variants not possible in traditional Shopify experiences
- Nearly all image/media is pushed into Shopify to allow Shopify to own the bandwidth/CDN experience
- No additional netlify/vercel cost as Oxygen comes included with Plus
- Unique marketing specific content type for generating ad focused pages with unique inline stoppable product experiences stitched into the rest of the modular system
