Introducing the new Perch Shop

The brand new Perch Shop Add-on is a full-featured e-commerce solution for Perch and Perch Runway. Use Perch Shop with Perch Runway and you have a powerful and flexible e-commerce solution for the biggest of online stores. Coupled with Perch it enables simple stores to be created – perfect for anyone wanting to sell a few items from their website.

Our intention with Perch Shop is to make Perch not only your first choice for content management, but also for e-commerce projects. This add-on is so fully featured and capable that it could be a standalone product in its own right. But you know that’s not our style, so it’s included free of charge with your Perch or Perch Runway licenses.

Behind the scenes the Perch Shop is fully integrated with Moltin. This integration means that we can concentrate on what we do best – content management – while Moltin deal with the myriad of payment processing possibilities that exist, and the heavy lifting of e-commerce implementation.

Our integration

We have a full integration with the Moltin API ensuring that you can create fully bespoke e-commerce sites, and your clients do not need to enter data in two places. Instead they can create products and manage their store from all from within Perch, with our easy to use interface.

If you’ve worked with e-commerce platforms before, you’ll know the frustrations. User experience and customer flows can be hard to customise. Large sections of interface are inaccessible to you as a designer, and you have to put up with whatever the system spits out. We’ve done our best to avoid all that by appling the Perch way of thinking to everything.

Products, shopping carts and checkout processes can be fully templated, as with everything in Perch. So you can use features such as our powerful Blocks and Repeaters functionality everywhere. With Perch you aren’t tied to a standard store look and feel, you can display your products in any way you like.

Checkout flows are all within your control. Do you want a full cart? No problem. Want to sell just a single product and skip the cart all together? That’s your choice too. With a full integration we make use of the flexible Moltin API, while ensuring that a minimum of API requests are made to the Moltin server. That way, we expect that many stores built on Perch Shop will be able to use a free Moltin account. When your store volume grows, you can rest assured that Moltin has the capability to grow with you.

We’ve thought a lot about performance, as always. With products stored in Perch and synchronised with Moltin, your store can be browsed without the need to make API requests. We’ve developed clever functionality that would store a user’s cart in the instance of checkout being unavailable to help recover a sale in that situation.

We’re developing tools to help you create bespoke shops for your customers, whether you need to simply sell an e-book from your blog or are building a fully-featured store with hundreds of products. We expect Perch Shop to fit your needs.

Perch Shop Features

The shop has a large number of features out of the box. See the add-ons page for full details of the features we expect to ship with at launch.

Why Moltin?

Providing a great e-commerce solution involves many aspects, all of equal importance. You want to be able to design bespoke stores, and showcase products in the best possible way. You need to give clients the ability to manage those products.

You need a streamlined checkout flow, and to be able to make changes to that process to reduce cart abandonment. You may want to be able to create special offers and link related products in bundle deals.

You need to be able to integrate with payment solutions that your client can use, and those that their customers will be happy to use.

It goes without saying that card data needs to be collected securely, and you and your clients are not exposed to unnecessary liabilities.

After customers have placed orders you will want automated delivery of downloads to happen and fulfilment of physical, shipped items to be easy for your clients to deal with.

By using the Moltin API we – and you – are able to use their enterprise grade security, their PCI Compliance, scalability and backups of key data. Moltin ensure that card data is handled securely, and that a huge variety of payment solutions are integrated with. We can spend our time making sure that Perch Shop is the most flexible and configurable solution for selling online.

Using Moltin means that we can make sure Perch Shop will work even on limited shared hosting, as the heavy lifting happens on the Moltin side.

Additional benefits include that, should other providers integrate with Moltin, you and your clients can benefit from that too. For example if a great point of sale unit is developed that your client could use to sell in person. They could take advantage of that without needing to integrate yet another solution. If your client decides to change strategy and rebuild their site differently in the future, they can keep their e-commerce platform in place without the need to completely migrate.

Perch Shop is almost here

We are ready to begin a private beta, if you currently have an e-commerce project you would like to use the Shop for, please drop us a line and we’ll get you on the programme. If you’d like to hear more about the Perch Shop and our approach to it, we’ve discussed it on episode 50 of the Perch Podcast.