Integrating a Shopify store into WordPress was a lot easier than I imagined. The Shopify product management is intuitive and preferable to the WooCommerce store management for a lot of users. The downside of Shopify is its theme / design aspect. If you can fit your website to a Shopify theme and work within that it can be great, but if you want a bespoke design that really stands out, then Shopify isn't ideal.

I found the WordPress plugin ShopWP which did exactly what we needed - pulled in product info, had several blocks that we could use to display the products as we needed per the design, integrated the Shopify cart into the WordPress site using a sidebar menu, and uses the Shopify checkout so that all the product & shop management can stay purely on Shopify.

The website also needed to be built with different phases of features / functionality to be added down the line. A "Wine Club" membership was added which was easy to make use of Shopify apps to implement. Integration into MailChimp was essential for this so that members receive emails about certain events, promotions, and member only information.

A B2B section was added which was a bigger hurdle as ShopWP only pulls through one set of products & prices. That was added to the Shopify website rather than the WordPress website, which - apart from specific pages - can only be accessed when logged into an approved B2B account where full access to the B2B pricing is available. If accessed by a non-B2B account, the user is simply redirected back to the WordPress website.

Most recently events functionality was added. Upcoming events are listed on the homepage and a CTA brings visitors to a list of all - past, present, and future - RougeVin events. Customers can book tickets either through the WordPress website itself, or through Eventbrite which is integrated so that when an event is added, it is automatically pushed to the RougeVin Eventbrite account.