A Preview of Perch Shop

At last week’s Perch Summit we gave a “State of Perch” presentation in which we conducted a brief tour of the work that has been done so far on Shop.

We thought it would be great to share some of that a little more widely, so I’ve stepped through creating a quick tour of two important aspects of the Shop experience. The first video shows the shop as it might be experienced by a customer. As with all Perch sites, the front end code it completely up to you. For this demo, I bought an off-the-shelf ecommerce template and wired it up to work with Perch Shop. I figured that was a pretty good test as it’s similar to the process you might follow with your own designs.

The site sells t-shirts – you can pick a product from the listing, and view its variants (size and colour). In the video I then pick a variant and add it to my cart.

The cart shows the items I’ve collected, enables me to adjust the quantity and switch to a different currency (a Runway feature). Shipping is calculated based on item weights and dimensions – so as soon as there are 11 t-shirts in the cart, the default shipping option tips from the free standard shipping to the chargeable Courier option.

I can then check out, choosing to log back into my account or just sign up with new details. Perch Shop supports password-less signups, so you can make the account process hidden. Just ask the customer for their name, email and address (you always need this for tax anyway). This example uses Stripe to check out, providing a very streamlined and secure process.

Once the customer has checked out, they get an automated email confirmation with the order details. This is template-based, and can be content managed from the Shop app.

The second video looks at the experience of managing a shop. The Shop app is actually three apps: Shop, Products and Orders. We start by looking at the Products app, which is where you manage the things you sell.

Products can be grouped into Brands, in addition to any sort of category structure you wish to put into place. The Products app also holds a centralised set of Options for things like Size and Colour in this example. These are completely down to you, of course. Each product can then make use of these options where they apply. When the options are applied to a product, Perch generates and maintains a list of Variants for the product. We don’t use them in this example, but each product can also have files – such as downloads the customer is purchasing.

Next we turn to the Shop app itself, which is where general concepts like Shipping, Tax and Currencies are handled. Our shop has two shipping methods, as we saw from the previous video. Shipping can be controlled on weight and size, as well as order values (both minimum and maximum values) – so you could flip the example and have free shipping on orders over a certain value.

The location-based tax system enables the creation of tax locations, with the ability to configure different tax rates for each location. A location can be set as your ‘home’ location, and you can also set a catch-all location to be used when no others match. That means you don’t need to set up a tax location for every possible country (phew!).

The emails the customer receives can be content managed and are based on a template, as always. You brand it all up, include whatever information you’d like, and make parts dynamic for your customer to promote or cross-sell from the email itself.

Finally, we look at the currency options. Shop has support for any currency, and comes loaded up with dozens of defaults. In Perch Runway you can enable multiple currencies – for Perch you can choose just one. Once your currencies are active, every price field has an option for each currency you trade in. Prices can be entered as tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive, depending on your settings.

We hope you find this progress as exciting as we do, and we’re really looking forward to getting Perch Shop into your hands in 2016!