Ecommerce & Retail · Shopify Apps
We developed a Shopify application that bridges the gap between customer area requirements and per-package product sales.
Outcome
Under- and over-ordering from manual area maths removed: enter a project area, get the right package count, wastage included, in any Shopify 2.0 theme.
An e-commerce retailer specializing in materials sold by area, like flooring and tiles, operates in a market where standard platforms create inherent friction. Customers plan projects in square feet, but products are sold in discrete units like boxes or pallets. This mismatch is a common point of failure for merchants in the construction and home improvement sectors.
The retailer found that this unit-versus-area problem was a direct cause of abandoned carts and costly ordering mistakes. Customers were forced to do manual calculations, often leading to confusion, under-ordering that delayed projects, or over-ordering that resulted in expensive returns. The standard Shopify product page was not equipped to handle this necessary translation, creating a poor user experience and impacting revenue.
Robust Devs was engaged to engineer a direct solution. We designed and built a micro-SaaS application that integrates a calculator into Shopify product pages. The tool gives customers an immediate, accurate answer to the question, "How many boxes do I need?", turning a point of friction into a moment of clarity and confidence.
The challenge
How we solved it
Technologies
The customer-facing widget allows users to input their required project area. It instantly computes the correct number of packages to add to the cart, automatically including the merchant-defined wastage percentage. This removes manual math, reduces user error, and provides immediate price transparency, building the confidence needed to complete a purchase.
The partner has access to a dedicated dashboard that provides full control over the calculator's logic. Within an interface built on Shopify's own design system, merchants can set product-specific rules for area per package and wastage. This flexibility ensures calculations are accurate across a diverse product catalog, from tile to turf.
How we built it
Shipped the calculator as a Theme App Extension, so it drops into any Shopify 2.0 theme as a native block. Merchants should not need a developer to add a calculator to a product page. A React Theme App Extension appears as a standard app block, which makes it compatible with any Shopify 2.0 storefront and lets the merchant place it themselves. The arithmetic, area per package and wastage percentage per product, lives in a Laravel backend behind a Polaris dashboard, so each product carries its own rules and the storefront only ever renders the answer. The extension asks the backend, gets a package count, and the page speed is untouched.
In the client's words
“People ordered flooring by the box for a room measured in square metres. The returns from that have mostly stopped.”
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