Challenge
The client was looking to develop an ecommerce store in Shopify to sell its products in Panama. The goal was to work together with some gas stations in Panama and courier service to make the shipment from the store/gas station to the delivery location indicated by the consumer.
The client sought help from Rootstack because there is no postal code in Panama and addresses are difficult to identify. In Panama, “corregimientos” are used to be able to indicate the exact address. However, Shopify needs to use the zip code data and does not allow you to create custom fields on the payment’s last page. To add a field, you have to pay a very expensive monthly subscription, and Heineken did not want to subscribe.
Our Solutions
Our software developers created a series of microservices, a small piece of code to do a very specific action that does not need a server to run, to run on the Amazon platform.
Since Shopify does not allow modifying the checkout page, we had to alter the cart page including a map where the user can indicate where they want to receive the order. The microservice receives the latitude and longitude information and queries if it has a nearby gas station in a record previously uploaded to AWS. It indicates which is the closest gas station. With that information, it allows you to continue to the payment page. At the end of the purchase, another microservice in charge of sending the information to the third party in charge of making the shipment indicates it looks for the product in a certain gas station and coordinates shipment. A link is also generated to be able to follow the order. This link is sent to Shopify and then to the consumer.
In this way, Rootstack achieved a successful modification in Shopify and achieve Heineken's ecommerce goals.
