Businesses are ready to go the extra mile to acquire customers and retain them for further repurchases. They look out for every option that helps their customers remember their brand name.

Conventional businesses like Hotels have been using numerous techniques to showcase their brand name in a repeated manner. From the food menus, the keys to the uniform their employees have, the customer can find the hotel name at every single place. For customers, it is branding. From the hotel’s perspective, it is “Personalization”

There are numerous online stores that offer such personalization for their users. The end-users can thus, add their brand logos, select their products, adjust the size, the color, preview the final designs, and then have a product with their name printed. The service providers, on the other hand, only have to accept the order and pack it for the buyer. Advanced product designing software solutions handle everything in between. Here is an example where a user is customizing a store product with his brand logo:

Adding-logo-box Source: Custom box printing 

Personalizing Shopify products is that easy!!!

On a similar occasion, the Shopify development team at The Brihaspati Infotech recently developed a custom Shopify app for designing personalized glassware. The app is capable of adding custom texts to the glassware products and previewing them before the purchase.

Through this blog, we will delve deeper into its need and how it helped the client with his daily functioning.

Need for developing a custom Shopify app

The Shopify app store has several product customizer tools, each meant to cater to specific needs. Business owners can select any that best fits their purpose. In fact, in one of our previous blogs, we have discussed the most popular ones along with their pricing plans and features: Popular Shopify Apps for Product Customization.

However, businesses tend to work differently. They often have unique services to offer that most pre-designed applications fail to meet. At this, business owners have to look out for bespoke options that are specially designed for their needs and are native to their existing infrastructure.

Our client offers custom printed kitchen products, glassware, and cutting boards, to be very specific. The store offers specially designed font styles with customizable texts. However, the client had no hint for previewing the custom fonts once they were ready. 

Above all, the client was receiving a good response for personalized drinkware sets, consisting of a mug and a few glasses. The available solutions were designed to offer customization to only one product at a time. The customers would often ask the client to have separate customizations to the various glassware pieces of the same set. The pre-made Shopify apps failed here.

That’s when the client hired Shopify developers from us who can assist him in offering custom-designed glassware on Shopify.

Developing a custom Shopify app for personalized drinking glasses

Being in the industry for over a decade, we were quick to understand the roadblocks our client was facing at that very moment. We jotted down the points that deserved attention and the right order to resolve them. The bigger picture was surely to offer individual customizations to the set items. Before proceeding any further, we first attended to the products that offered single customization, much like creating smaller bricks for the larger concrete structure. 

Later we transformed this idea to offer multiple customizations for an assembled glassware set, as the client wished. There we were with a Shopify app for designing personalized drinkware.

User-friendly admin panel to manage the designs

The client provided us with all the designs he wanted the store to offer. We converted the images to customizable formats that helped us with further proceedings. The store basically offers two kinds of designs:

  • Alphabet major design
  • Name designs 

The store offers several more designs based on the font style and the subsequent customizable fields. Our Shopify app for printing custom drinking glasses categorizes the products with design templates for easy management. The extensions can be seen in the picture below and so is the difference in designs for relatively similar data.

Implementing-Multiple Font-Designs

It is worth noticing that the same product offers different custom designs under different name extensions. While the K1 design emphasizes on the alphabet, N1 design does for the full names.

The designs are equally easy to manage. Shopify admins can upload their designs in simpler clicks. In the following GIF, we are uploading the design for the letter K under the category K3.

Uploading design for letter K

Live Previewing the custom design

Our Shopify app for designing personalized drinkware offers a live preview of the final designs. The product customization section offers all the fields for customizing a glassware design. The user can edit the texts and can preview them in real-time.

For instance, the user in the following screen can be seen customizing the Date field for letter A. The customer further adds a name of his choice:

Custom Letter Design

The customer needs to confirm the final design before placing the order. For the same, we have added a pop-up screen that shows up with the final customized design. The customer can proceed with order confirmation once the design is accepted.

Confirming the custom designs

Customizing complete glassware sets

Here comes one of the most crucial features of our Shopify app for custom printed drinkware. Glassware sets often consist of multiple products. For example, in the following picture, we have a Drinkware set that consists of a Decanter, a couple of glasses, and a box. Amazingly, even if they all are part of a set, we have different designs on the products.

Customizing a glassware set

With our custom-designed app by their side, online store owners can now offer personalized engraved drinking glasses on Shopify. Customers can now create designs for individual products of the set and preview them.

To implement the same, we have created separate customizers for each set item. Users can select the item for customization, make the desired changes, and confirm their designs. For example, in the following picture, we can find 4 different customizer options for the same drinkware set.

Managing glassware customization-Decanter

The customizer options change with the item being selected. The app now treats the set items more like independent store products. In the picture above, we had a few fields for creating a custom design for the Decanter.

The fields, however, change when the user chooses to customize a glass from the same glassware set, as shown in the picture below:

Managing glassware customization-Glass

The store customers can now own personalized drinkware sets with far simpler clicks.

Challenge faced while developing the custom Shopify app

Product images are generally  created in two ways:

1.Raster media

2.Vector media

Raster media are easier to showcase as they are offline images, GIFs or videos. Vector media are, however, created via paths that are often dynamic and accept live instructions from the end-user. We have talked about 3-D product modeling in one of our blogs, where the customers can rotate the costumes in a live 3-D format, the best example for Vector media.

The custom-designed Shopify app deals with the SVG format. Our purpose was to show it live on the product page and export it in BMP format. SVG file entails a known drawback with it especially when it is exported- font mismatch.

SVG files often fail to retain the texts and that had a clear effect on the desired customization. As a result, the customizations didn’t reflect on the live store the way they were expected and thus, the exported files.

Workaround to retain the fonts:

The SVG files do not have much support for the fonts that we used for designing, which affected its display on the live store. We came up with the idea to introduce them manually. We included fonts to the SVG on Imagick libraries to add custom fonts.

As a result, the SVG file is rendered for live editing on the store itself with added benefits at the time of exporting them.

Our experience with custom Shopify app development

The e-Commerce development team at The Brihaspati Infotech has delivered some excellent out of box solutions for its clients in its 10+ years of professional experience. They have played a crucial role in setting up complete online stores, migrating them, and creating bespoke tools that support the store with daily functioning.

In one of our recent blogs, we have discussed a few of our custom-designed Shopify product customizers, their functioning, and why they are that special to the clients.

Our experts have worked on nearly every popular e-commerce platform, you can think of- Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Shopify and many others. You can find more of our e-commerce development achievements in our E-commerce archive.

Final words

E-commerce is evolving- it is pretty fast, only if you can acknowledge it. At this, you really can’t let a newbie take over the audience you have accumulated for several years. If you too are stuck at creating an online store or showcasing the unique services your brick-and-mortar store offers, you can contact us right away.

In any case, if you too want a Shopify app for custom engraved drinking glasses, you can hire Shopify experts from us. That we have developed an app that is very similar to your needs, our experts can deliver one for you quicker, thus saving you time and money.

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