Visune

The objective for this Shopify Plus project was to create a process where users could purchase tokens (branded here as Units) to redeem downloadable products, with the added ability for teams to collaborate and share assets.

The main objectives included implementing the unit payment system, managing team credits and downloads efficiently, and protecting download links from unauthorised sharing. As part of its strategic growth plan, Visune transitioned from the standard Shopify platform to Shopify Plus.

This upgrade was driven by the need to leverage the extensive features and scalability that Shopify Plus offers, particularly in managing complex operations and the added benefit of being able to customise the checkout area. By moving to Shopify Plus, Visune aimed to improve its unit-based system and team management capabilities, ensuring a more streamlined and efficient user experience.

We consulted with Visune to ensure Shopify Plus was the right fit for the next stage of Visune’s overall development. To address Visune's objectives, a bespoke data management system was developed using Shopify's metaobjects. This allowed for the creation of team metaobjects to store information about team members, remaining credits, and purchased products.

DESIGN & IMPLEMENTATION

The checkout needed to handle two separate possibilities. If the customer was purchasing a subscription or top up then a standard card payment would be displayed. Alternatively if the cart only contained digital assets, then card details shouldn’t be requested, but rather the customer needed to know how many Units their downloads would cost, and how many they had remaining. This required the Checkout Extensibility features of Shopify Plus to enable additional sections to be added in to display this information through the checkout.

Team Management: Teams are managed using custom metaobjects, allowing for easy tracking of team credits and downloads. This system enabled seamless collaboration among team members, and being accessible through the admin, enables the Visune team to manage these as well, to credit bonus Units or free downloads for example.

Download Management: Each purchase of a digital asset has a limited number of downloads. Once the limit was reached, users could purchase additional Units to refresh their download limit. An authentication system was implemented to protect download links from unauthorised sharing.

Subscriptions: One of the key areas of development was the subscription model. Each month, customers on a paid plan would receive a number of Units based on the tier that they have subscribed to. A sequence of Shopify Flows were used to identify the day that each subscription would recur, and grant the relevant number of Units to that team.

INEGRATIONS

A lot of the processing needed to be done externally with Shopify, and a combination of Webhooks, and triggers from Shopify Flows were needed to send data to bespoke scripts. These scripts processed the information and used the Shopify API to update the relevant team and download information. The scripts also added logging details to the original subscription order so that the Visune admins had visibility of any updates that had taken place.

A crucial element of the scope was the protection of the download links. Representing the purchased product, these links needed to be a single use only and expire within a given time frame so that they couldn’t be shared. Due to the large size of the assets (some were several gigabytes in size), the standard Shopify file system couldn’t be used, so a sequence of authentication was required to ensure that all download requests were from genuine customers and hadn’t been tampered with in any way.

TESTING & UX

The platform was thoroughly tested to ensure that all functionalities worked seamlessly across desktop and mobile devices. This included checking the unit payment system, team management features, and download limits to ensure a smooth user experience.