Us and Shopify

(The date of this entry is faked due to database collapse. Sorry for any inconvenience)

I’m putting the final touches on the Retrorocket entry in the Shopify Vision theme competition, with a design I’m calling “Rebound” (after an intial design attempt, which I called “Unbound” proved, um, less than awesome).

Shopify is a hosted electronic commerce solution. It’s basically a shopping cart solution, but with several nice features, the most important and innovative being a well-designed, logical, elegant administration interface.

Vision is a brilliant marketing and awareness-raising strategy. The long-term success of a web application like Shopify is going to depend on both the ecosystem of secondary services that grow around it, and the buzz and word-of-mouth that it generates; Vision serves both needs by giving web designers the chance to trial the application and become comfortable with customising it, and by targeting web designers, jadedPixel, the creators of Shopify get the ear of some of the web’s most influential trend-setters. Never mind that they’ve already earned massive brownie-points with open-source enthusiasts by making their templating engine, Liquid, freely available, but the whole thing has been built with Ruby on Rails, the world’s trendiest—and let’s face it, not without good cause—web application development framework. I’m just in awe.

I’m pretty confident that Shopify will be a success—I think it’ll be a no-brainer for web designers to point their small-business clients to it as a simple, easy-to-use e-commerce solution. I’ll certainly be doing so, and I expect that Shopify template design will become a central component of Retrorocket Design’s range of services.