The last few years have been really interesting in terms of eCommerce platforms – with Shopify Plus being the real challenger in the luxury, lifestyle and fashion markets – putting pressure on the likes of Magento Commerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud in particular. I was recently looking for luxury Shopify Plus examples for a client and decided to publish some of the good examples (in terms of UX and usage of Shopify Plus) as a blog post.

The vast majority of the work I’ve done over the last few years has been focused on migrating to Magento or Shopify Plus. At Vervaunt we tend to work with these more than any other platform because of the types of businesses we work with, as a result of our team’s experience and their general popularity. I personally have spent the majority of my career working in and around Magento and, more recently, that focus has shifted to be between these two platforms.

Over the past 12-18 months, as Shopify Plus has continued to grow for bigger and more complex retailers, I’ve had a number of clients that have decided to take their development in-house, for a variety of reasons and with varying impacts in different areas. This seems to be a bit of a trend with Shopify Plus at the moment and even with new projects, people are very aware that it’s far easier to create an internal development team for Shopify / Shopify Plus than it would be with a platform like Magento, for example.

With Shopify Plus being such a popular choice with fashion and lifestyle retailers, one of the questions I get asked most commonly is how the platform can be improved for visual merchandising of collections. Different retailers have different requirements here, but overall most are trying to achieve a similar end goal, to reduce manual effort and make the products users are seeing more relevant.

Over the last year or so I’ve worked on a few different projects that have involved a PIM (across Magento and Shopify Plus), which has helped to make data migration much easier, allow for more complex logic, add a layer of data governance, take various things out of the eCommerce platform and generally make managing product data more efficient and effective.

This is something that a lot of Shopify Plus stores either seem to get wrong or they prioritise journey-based breadcrumbs, in my opinion – so I decided to write up what I consider to be best practice, from both an SEO and usability perspective. Although the ideal scenario would be that product URLs would remain top-level and the breadcrumbs would still be based on the user’s journey from a product listing page, this is very hard to achieve and very few have made it work properly.