Panasonic
One storefront, multiple brands. All under the Panasonic.
Shop Panasonic is a one-stop eCommerce experience that lets customers browse Panasonic’s diverse range of product offerings in a single Shopify storefront.
Custom Shopify Themes
Shopify Plus Design
Shopify Development
Headlesss CMS
The Project
The idea behind Shop.Panasonic was to give customers a top-down view of the entire Panasonic product line, with brand-specific styling and UI/UX for each of the different brand categories. To accomplish this goal on the frontend, we essentially would need to build five separate custom Shopify themes, and then tie them together with a combined homepage and nav menu by leveraging a custom semi-headless CMS configuration.
The bigger challenge was in the backend, where we would need to hook in five separate Admins, with unique payment, inventory, and fulfillment requirements for each brand category. The multi-admin configuration would allow each brand to manage their own areas of the site independently, with shared access for high-level Panasonic leadership.
The Challenges
Create a multi-themed Shopify Plus storefront with five unique frontend experiences with brand-specific styling and UI/UX
Create a multi-admin backend experience, with unique payment, inventory and fulfillment settings for each brand channel
Give non-developer internal teams the ability to add special promotions at a product level, or site-wide
Give non-developer internal teams the ability to add external links to preferred vendors at a product level, respecting regional distribution contracts and availability requirements
Develop custom API configurations to integrate Price Spider and ERP dashboards
Our Solution
Five Themes, One Storefront
We developed a lightning-fast, custom frontend configuration that gives customers a bird’s eye view of the entire Panasonic product line, with brand-specific styling and UI/UX for each of the five different specialty brands. We essentially built five separate themes, and then used a semi-headless CMS configuration to tie them together in a combined homepage and navigation menu. This tiered, multi-level navigation system allows users to seamlessly and intuitively navigate between five different brand menus, and over 40 category sub-menus.
Multi-Channel Admin and Fulfillment
Each of the five frontend themes has relevant backend functionality. We developed a custom backend configuration that hooks in five separate Shopify Admins, with unique payment, inventory, and fulfillment requirements for each top-level brand. The multi-admin configuration allows each sub-brand to manage their own section of the site independently, with shared access for high-level Panasonic leadership. To give high-level leaders access to the full scope of the Shop.Panasonic backend, we developed custom APIs that tie into multiple fulfillment and ERP channels.
Dynamic Functionality, No Coding Required
Due to restrictions from regional distribution contracts, certain Panasonic product lines are not available for direct purchase on Shop.Panasonic. To sidestep this limitation, we developed an external linking system that leverages Shopify Metafields, allowing non-developer internal teams to manually assign external links to the preferred buying channel for each product, without touching the theme code. Similarly, leveraging Metafields and a custom API configuration, we developed a Price Spider integration that allows brand leaders to manage promotions dynamically, either at a per-product, or sitewide basis, without the need for further development.