UnityPoint Health, a network of hospitals and clinics in Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin, required a quick solution to replace their five online gift shops soon after their new public-facing website went live. This posed a tight deadline for MethodFactory to deliver an Ecommerce replacement solution for five individual stores with different inventories.
MethodFactory quickly created an approach and proposal to replace the existing legacy gift shops with Shopify stores. We needed a platform we knew we could quickly migrate to and configure, including many out-of-box functionality that we leveraged to meet the timeline. Shopify platform supports over 4.1 million stores worldwide, generating 200B in sales annually.
The Business Requirements
We started with the must-have requirements for the new platform:
- MethodFactory will implement out-of-box Shopify functionality to complete the five Gift stores to keep the project to a simple build and a quick-launch timeline.
- The to-be Gift Shops will provide at least equivalent functionality to the current state (AS-IS).
- The gift shops will have navigation created on the UnityPoint Health website to navigate the user to the Shopify Gift Shop.
- The Shopify platform must provide the ability to import product details as a spreadsheet instead of building them individually.
- The Shopify platform must allow business/staff accounts to manage products, inventory, and orders.
- There will be no direct integration from the Platform to UnityPoint Health infrastructure for fulfillment. Order fulfillment will be completed manually from Shopify.
- The Shopify platform must provide the ability to hold orders before processing credit cards. UnityPoint Health would like the ability to not auto-process orders and payments.
- Shopify will send emails to store administrators when an order is placed.
- Authorize.net is the preferred payment gateway.
Shopify was chosen for this project because of its vast partner ecosystem, Theme library, intuitive backend administration user experience, custom ability, and exceptional partner customer support. Ecommerce platforms have been around now since the early 2000s. Shopify has perfected the user experience from store management to customer UI/UX experiences.
The Solution
The solution aimed to ensure a seamless UI experience aligned with the new website’s aesthetics, prioritizing enhanced user satisfaction. Additionally, the solution needed to incorporate custom fields to capture required information about the gift recipients, room numbers, and well wishes. The Shopify platform allows adding custom fields on the product detail page or cart page easily through the Shopify coding language.
The information collected in these fields is automatically added to the backend order by Shopify. This allows the order managers to route the gift items to the correct guest or employee of their hospital.
Leveraging our extensive expertise in the Ecommerce ecosystem, MethodFactory determined that Shopify’s platform offered the ideal quick-to-market solution.
Collaborating closely with UnityPoint Health, MethodFactory expedited the export of all products into an import file format and seamlessly loaded them into the five Shopify stores. Shopify provides a simple file format import process allowing each store’s product catalog with images to be easily imported.
Despite not having at the time of the final CSS and HTML for the new site header and footer due to time constraints, our UI design team easily recreated the desired look and feel through Shopify’s theme customization abilities.
Conclusion
In under 30 days, the first site was ready for launch, starting with Des Moines, which encompasses four hospitals. This accomplishment underscores MethodFactory’s commitment to delivering innovative Ecommerce solutions quickly and efficiently. We are proud to have collaborated with UnityPoint Health on this project and eagerly anticipate future opportunities.
Quickly after the Des Moines gift store was delivered, Waterloo and Quad Cities followed. And finally, Cedar Rapids and Maidson.
We are very pleased with the outcome of the stores and are very grateful that we could be called upon to solve their need for quick storefront implementations.
Gift Stores
Madison, WI
