Developing a Custom Knife Builder App – BigCommerce

Personalization has become a key concept for the eCommerce industry. Its earlier stages involved product recommendations or showing relevant content to potential users. However, multiple advances in technology and development approaches have transformed the traditional personalization concept.

If you are planning to implement personalization in your existing website, a custom product configurator integration is the best choice to make. Something it will do more for your store is- offering your buyers several options to select from, such that the user who wasn’t happy with the first product ends up paying for a variant, rather than finding a new store.

Forwarding with the thought, the experienced BigCommerce development team at The Brihaspati Infotech recently helped a client for developing a Bigcommerce app to build custom knife online. As a result, the buyers can customize the entire knife all by themselves on the client’s store.

Here is a glimpse of the bespoke Bigcommerce app we designed for the client. The buyer can be seen selecting the three customizations for his knife:

With that, let’s get started with our custom knife design app development on Bigcommerce.

Need for developing a custom knife builder app on Bigcommerce

The Bigcommerce app store has some excellent predesigned product customizer applications. Bigcommerce vendors can readily install any application of their choice to feature product customization on their exclusive store.

While it might save them ample time at getting a custom app developed,  the predesigned solution can often come with a heavy design and a set of redundant scripts that can only slow down your store functions. An expensive price range is just another factor.

The client thus needed our help to develop an app that feels very native to the store, is lightweight, and still excellent with its performance.

Custom BigCommerce Knife Builder App: Development Approach

BigCommerce is a top-rated SaaS eCommerce platform extremely preferred by SMEs and mid-market entrepreneurs. The software offers a great platform to develop a product customization application, that too without using any third-party extension.

This time, the idea was to provide the buyers with several options to select from for their knives like the Blade type, color, handle, and more. The core concepts of BigCommerce that come in handy while accomplishing this task include product options, option sets, and values.

So, what are product options, option sets, and values in BigCommerce?

To embark on, options refer to the attributes (color, size, etc.) of a product that further holds the values for your product. Here, the choice of  ‘attributes’ allows the users to customize or modify a product.

And, the options set are a reusable set that can be reused and applied to different products. The options and values that we discussed above belong to an option set that constitutes a product.

Bigcommerce App for Custom Knife Designs: Our Workflow

Although these terms sound quite easy to understand and use, there remains a need to follow a hierarchical procedure to put everything in alignment. To give you insights into our workflow, I have curated a list of steps undertaken by our team.

Step 1: To start with, we created a product category in the BigCommerce admin panel. The categories help to collect all the similar products (in terms of attributes) under one section. Otherwise, the website will be cluttered from the front-end. Moreover, the admin will also find it hard to take and manage orders.

Step 2: One additional requirement of choosing a product configurator integration is to build a custom product template supporting multiple images displaying all the possible combinations tried by users. Because whenever changes in the product attributes and values occur, there needs to be a front-end page that can respond while getting commands from the back-end rules.

To serve this need, the eCommerce developers went on developing a custom product page template that was completely independent of the other pages and functionalities of the whole website. The basic front-end technologies like JS (JavaScript) and HTML are involved to construct an appealing and responsive product template.

Additionally, product options were created at the backend, especially for the custom product page template developed.

With that, let’s get started with our custom knife design app development on Bigcommerce.

Need for developing a custom knife builder app on Bigcommerce

The Bigcommerce app store has some excellent predesigned product customizer applications. Bigcommerce vendors can readily install any application of their choice to feature product customization on their exclusive store.

While it might save them ample time at getting a custom app developed,  the predesigned solution can often come with a heavy design and a set of redundant scripts that can only slow down your store functions. An expensive price range is just another factor.

The client thus needed our help to develop an app that feels very native to the store, is lightweight, and still excellent with its performance.

Custom BigCommerce Knife Builder App: Development Approach

BigCommerce is a top-rated SaaS eCommerce platform extremely preferred by SMEs and mid-market entrepreneurs. The software offers a great platform to develop a product customization application, that too without using any third-party extension.

This time, the idea was to provide the buyers with several options to select from for their knives like the Blade type, color, handle, and more. The core concepts of BigCommerce that come in handy while accomplishing this task include product options, option sets, and values.

So, what are product options, option sets, and values in BigCommerce?

To embark on, options refer to the attributes (color, size, etc.) of a product that further holds the values for your product. Here, the choice of  ‘attributes’ allows the users to customize or modify a product.

And, the options set are a reusable set that can be reused and applied to different products. The options and values that we discussed above belong to an option set that constitutes a product.

Bigcommerce App for Custom Knife Designs: Our Workflow

Although these terms sound quite easy to understand and use, there remains a need to follow a hierarchical procedure to put everything in alignment. To give you insights into our workflow, I have curated a list of steps undertaken by our team.

Step 1: To start with, we created a product category in the BigCommerce admin panel. The categories help to collect all the similar products (in terms of attributes) under one section. Otherwise, the website will be cluttered from the front-end. Moreover, the admin will also find it hard to take and manage orders.

Step 2: One additional requirement of choosing a product configurator integration is to build a custom product template supporting multiple images displaying all the possible combinations tried by users. Because whenever changes in the product attributes and values occur, there needs to be a front-end page that can respond while getting commands from the back-end rules.

To serve this need, the eCommerce developers went on developing a custom product page template that was completely independent of the other pages and functionalities of the whole website. The basic front-end technologies like JS (JavaScript) and HTML are involved to construct an appealing and responsive product template.

Additionally, product options were created at the backend, especially for the custom product page template developed.

Step 3: Moving ahead, the list of values for product options were provided along with display name & type along with the choices available for the end-users. For instance,

Step 4: In addition to all these settings in the Bigcommerce app for custom knife designs, the developers facilitated the client with a choice of show/hide options in the custom product page template designed by us. To achieve that, the client simply needs to stuff in the custom instructions provided by us in the code at the backend.

Now, if we conclude all these steps together, we can visualize the process in a simple chart provided below:-

This image is a perfect illustration of the hierarchy followed to achieve the custom Bigcommerce knife builder app development as the client demands.

Here, our final product is Knife. And, the blade is a set of options that can be customized on the basis of different attributes assigned under the Options section. Now, the features that you can customize in a blade fall under the options followed by different values that can be chosen.

The final result, not only the blade but also the handle and the related accessories can be customized at the buyer’s end.

In addition to this, there was also a requirement of hiding some values in case of non-availability at the client’s end. Here, we created a custom set of functions and provide the admin with the authority to enable or disable as per his convenience. 

With that, our BigCommerce app for designing custom knife builder online proves its worth.

Our experience with Custom Knife Design Online Store Development

This wasn’t the first time that the experts at The Brihaspati Infotech have developed a product customizer solution. Our product customization tools archive will get you through our past projects where the clients had specifically asked for bespoke applications on their stores and our experts leveraged the best technologies to implement the same.

With BigCommerce alone, our experts have been outsourced for a variety of e-commerce development tasks ranging from a complete store setup to offering a custom admin panel.

If you too are facing issues while handling your BigCommerce store, you can always hire BigCommerce experts from us who apart from resolving your issues are known to offer excellent store recommendations.

Parting thoughts!

When it comes to personalizing the web experiences, the vendors need to stay attentive to each detail at both user and consumer end experiences. No doubt, the plug, and play solutions appeal easy to deal with and might work well in some cases. However, if you plan to incorporate a custom solution that can provide a thorough detailing of everything in terms of features and flexibility, the outcome is always a fruitious one. 

And, in case you are also looking for a BigCommerce app to customize your own knife online or something similar functionality to deliver personalized products & other offerings, contact our team of experts. At The Brihaspati Infotech, we provide a keen eye to the project’s requirements while delivering the best possible solution.