Artwork e-commerce platform rebuild

Brief

Build a custom e-commerce platform to house thousands of artworks from hundreds of artists. These need to be imported in from a legacy system and categorised by various types and taxonomies.

Context

In 2017 I was still doing a lot of consulting and freelance work for studios that developed e-commerce and digital marketing solutions. One of these was Creative Approach, a digital marketing agency in Melbourne.

Artist Lane was a client of theirs that was on an old e-commerce platform that had to be migrated and needed a refresh. The platform features thousands of artworks in many different categories that customers can purchase across various mediums like canvas or print.

Solution

The project was split into two pieces, the first being the large import of work into a WooCommerce backend which the client felt most comfortable with. These were supplied as spreadsheets with SKUs, artist names, categories and associated artwork filenames.

This was an long and delicate process to make sure the data got imported into custom product post types and associated taxonomies correctly.

The next stage was to build the custom front-end which the client wanted to use a full screen responsive grid for, you can see below what this looks like on mobile vs desktop:

I used MasonryJS for the responsive grid layout which worked great.

Overall, this was an interesting project to get stuck into larger sets of product data and how to tackle import of these and maintain links, categories as well as the import of associated files.