Hello! I work for a thrift store that uses Shopify. My work requires me to price many unique items as quickly as possible, and I feel like Shopify wasn’t really designed for that. Pages take too long to load, it takes too many clicks to print a label, labels cannot be customized per-item (such as custom titles), etc…
So, I decided to make a system that can work alongside Shopify. Well, technically it can work alongside any POS system that doesn’t produce unique tracking numbers for each individual item, but I am focused on Shopify. All this system uses from Shopify is variant tracking numbers. It will generate a barcode or QR code based on the number, and insert it into the generated label.
It would be a pain to set up manually if you have a lot of variants (like we do), so I made a page crawler that gathers all of the variants for me in the correct jsonl format, and I just save that to the data file. That way I do not need to add hundreds of thousands of variants manually.
But, let’s get to the fun stuff. I am making this post because I want to gauge interest. Would this system benefit your store? Do you have any recommendations for development if it would? Keep in mind I am a minimum wage employee, and I work on this in my free time, so development takes a bit.
What can it do?
On the admin side, you can add / edit:
- Colors and color cycle.
- Necessary for any store that uses color cycle discounts
- Sources
- Basically vendors
- Source groups
- For sources that share categories and subcategories
- Categories
- Edit subcategory sort order (newest first / alphabetical)
- Subcategories
- Edit variant sort order (newest first / alphabetical)
- Add standard pricing notes
- Variants
- Add an image and/or text that appears in an element when hovering (tooltip)
On the user side…
I designed this system on 3 core ideas (in order of importance):
- Allow custom label generation, and custom titles per item
- Design an easy-to-understand UI with amazing UX
- Make the website as quick to navigate as humanly possible
I think I have succeeded in all of these. Almost everything has a shortcut, and anything can be found with the search bar. Switch colors and sources with keybinds, enter the search bar and toggle functionality with ‘/’, everything (including the print window) can be navigated out of using Esc.
Search variants from within a subcategory just by typing. Almost everything can be navigated using arrow keys & enter. If a category only has one subcategory, it instantly navigates into it when clicked, and everything loads instantly (even with hundreds of thousands of variants). I have put a lot of consideration into removing as many clicks as possible.
All in all, I can navigate to any variant and print the label in less than 10 seconds. Take a look:
This is in active development. I designed it to make things as efficient as possible for the store I work at, but I think it might be useful elsewhere as well. It currently is only really beneficial to stores that occasionally add new variants (since you have to manually create them twice; once in Shopify, and once here). That said, would something like this be useful to your store? Any notes?