 is one of our favorite hosted ecommerce platforms. It does a great job of making it easy to manage products, product variants, coupons, refunds, etc etc etc. It also has a pretty decent theme system so you can customize your online store to match your brand.

It’s a perfect example of “pick one thing and do it really well”. But that also means it’s not a replacement for an entire website.

 website, they already had a large Shopify store. They had several years of sales data they wanted to preserve and they wanted to continue managing all of their product inventory on Shopify.

They wanted lots of content and other functionality on the website-proper so re-theming the existing Shopify store wasn’t an option.

The lazy route would’ve been to build the website and kick users over to Shopify anytime they were doing something product related. However, we at VIA Studio, are not lazy! We want to find the best solutions for our clients and their customers and we want to do it on time and on budget too.

Luckily, Shopify has us covered by offering a great 

. Using that and WordPress, we built an admin system that let Firstbuild pull in available products from Shopify. They could then extend those products in WordPress with additional imagery, copy, videos, etc. Any time they added or updated a product in Shopify, those changes were immediately available in WordPress.

On the end-user side of things, we wanted to have a rich easy-to-use shopping experience. Shopify also makes this super simple with their 

This takes care of all of the complicated stuff like managing a shopping cart, quantities of products, pricing, etc. We could whatever exciting UI we want and easily wire it up to Shopify. Then, when it’s time to pay, we send them to Shopify and they take it from there.

It’s the best of all possible worlds. We get the flexibility of using a tool like WordPress while letting Shopify handle all of the complexity of ecommerce.

One issue we ran into with the Shopify API was trying to marry data from the Admin API vs the Storefront API. The problem is that they use different ID formats!

On the Admin-side, a product might have an ID like 

Z2lkOi8vc2hvcGlmeS9Qcm9kdWN0Lzc0NTIyNTgxNDAzMA==

This lead to loads of initial headaches trying to move data around from the admin to the front-end and still know which product we were dealing with in the code.

After a bit of research, we realized that the Storefront ID has just a Base64-encoded version of the Admin ID!

That lead us to write this handy little function and all of our woes were solved*:


* It’s been a couple of years since we did this so there may be a better way to do it. If anyone knows what it is, 

Ecommerce

PHP, Javascript & React

Platform and CRM Integrations

A custom ecommerce experience with Shopify

Over the past year, the VIA Studio development team has carefully crafted and published five different WordPress plugins to help developers and webmasters get the most out of their sites and other commonly used services.

Lead Integration: Gravity Forms + Salesforce WordPress Plugin

Have you experienced frustration trying to connect web forms to your CRM systems? We feel your pain! This is what led to the development of our 

 plugin. It allows WordPress sites to easily integrate and funnel potential customers and leads from Gravity Forms to SalesForce systems. It works with any WordPress theme.

Stop worrying about the setup and management of your Gravity Forms to SalesForce integrations and instead focus on driving leads and results!

Gravity Forms + Salesforce WordPress Plugin

Do you need greater control of the dates available in your website’s lead forms? The Date Field Customizer for Gravity Forms plugin gives you the control you’ve been searching for!

 blocks off dates from calendars in website forms including holidays or otherwise general blackout dates for your business. On the front end, the plugin also allows users to select date ranges or select recurring dates.

The Date Field Customizer For Gravity Forms plugin finally gives you the backend control you’ve needed. On the front-end, wow your site users with a better experience scheduling appointments, sales calls or meetings.

Entries Importing for Gravity Forms Plugin

Do you struggle with sharing data between two separate Gravity Forms? The VIA Entries Importing For Gravity Forms plugin will help you transition data from one form to another with ease!

 gives users the ability to import/export entries between separate Gravity Forms. Simply map the form fields from one form to another and let the plugin do the rest of the work! Additionally, data can be shared between two forms that may not necessarily have the same form fields.

Spend less time switching between spreadsheets and .csv files trying to manually manage your form data and instead let the VIA Entries Importing For Gravity Forms plugin do the work for you!

Have you ever struggled with syncing your inventory data between Square and WooCommerce or WP eCommerce? We understand that efficient management of your eCommerce and point of sale (POS) systems is business-critical and should not consume hours of your day. That’s why we developed the 

Synchronize your store’s data by product name, price, and category from Square to WooCommerce or WP E-Commerce and back. Just provide the API key for your accounts and the plugin does the rest!

Any time your online store’s data changes in Square, this WordPress plugin will sync with your eCommerce platform and the same goes for changes on your website’s store. Don’t waste countless hours trying to consolidate changes between your ecommerce platforms manually ever again!

Sync inventory amounts, product names, and categories between Square and either WooCommerce or WP e-Commerce

Products sync back and forth bases on webhooks from Square and action hooks from WooCommerce and WP e-Commerce

Need an easy solution for managing multiple or temporary users or your site? Having trouble utilizing passwordless login authentication with magic links? VIA Studio has developed a quick and easy way to generate login magic links that allow users access into accounts with requiring usernames & passwords.

 auto-generates a secure, magic link that appears in your WordPress admin in the user’s table and the user profile screen. With the press of a button generate the magic link to enable logins without a username or password.

Plugin settings allow admins to customize the expiration of security tokens and set when the generated links expire and even regenerate expired links from the admin panel. Additionally, magic links can be set to not expire until the admin chooses to deactivate it.

Simple login solutions have never been easier!

Generate links that will log a user into their account

All plugin licenses for VIA Studio plugins include; a 30-day money-back guarantee, one year of updates and support, and automatic renewals!

WordPress

WordPress Custom Plugin Development

Introducing VIA Studio's WordPress Plugins

Non-profit Marketing

Backend Development

UX / UI

Illustration

Fund For The Arts

Need one platform to talk to another? We’ve got that. Automation, synchronization to real-time APIs, we’ve built and managed them all. Ecommerce and Customer relationship management (CRM) integrations are our specialties, but so far there’s not been two systems we couldn’t put in touch with one another.

Platform and CRM Integrations

Platform and CRM Integrations: Case Studies

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Fund For The Arts

Platform and CRM Integrations: Blog Posts

A custom ecommerce experience with Shopify

Introducing VIA Studio's WordPress Plugins