Custom checkout implementation for Foodprepper

Who is Foodprepper?

Foodprepper is a new concept where you can subscribe to a weekly food delivery service. You can buy it once or start a membership to get homemade meals delivered to your doorstep once a week or every two weeks. 

Every Sunday to Thursday, you can select new meals for your subscription the following week. The box consists of healthy breakfasts, lunches and snacks that are ready to eat.

Custom product selector 

To make it possible for customers to put together their own boxes, we built a product selector in the front end of Shopify. Customers have to pick menu items until they reach their threshold amount, for example, €39. Then they can move on to the next step. 

The crazy thing about Foodprepper is that the menu items change every week. Once you have a subscription, you can choose your new weekly menu between Sunday and Thursday. 

Every Thursday, you will be able to make the last changes to your subscription, and on Friday, everything will be prepared so they can send your food out during the weekend.

Issues with subscriptions in Shopify

A big, recurring issue in Shopify is that you cannot use local payment methods if you run your subscriptions through the Shopify checkout.

If you operate in Belgium or the Netherlands, chances are that in a checkout environment, you want to have the choice to add different payment methods, like Paypal, Google Pay, Bancontact, KBC/CBC and so on. Shopify has chosen, when it comes to subscriptions, to limit its merchant's payment options. The only payment methods you can choose are credit card or Paypal. You can't pay using a SEPA direct debit with the KBC app, for example. 

For companies operating in Europe, where those local payment methods are very popular, this situation is not good for conversion. We’ve seen with multiple clients that the conversion rate on subscriptions is substantially lower than on one-off purchases. 

Building a solution together with Firmhouse

That's why Firmhouse exists. It’s a software tool with a checkout that replaces the Shopify checkout and does offer local payment methods.

So for Foodprepper, we made a Shopify website with a completely custom frontend design. As soon as you go to the checkout section, you will be redirected to Firmhouse.

This does, on the other hand, mean that your order did not go through Shopify, and Shopify doesn't know if something was purchased. The connection between Firmhouse and Shopify is very important because in Firmhouse you check out and make the payment, but Shopify needs to know if the order has actually gone through. 

And so, we built a custom application using APIs that ensures that Firmhouse is fully integrated into the Foodprepper website. Of course, this goes in both directions. If you click on ‘subscription’ in your account in Shopify, we are going to make an API call to Firmhouse through the custom app we built and ask: this person who has logged in with this mail address what subscriptions does that person have with Firmhouse? 

In Shopify you can then manage your subscriptions by pausing them or even stopping them. All changes must then also be made in Firmhouse and that is based on the APIs contained in the custom app. 

We built a similar app for BRAUZZ.. You can read about it in their case. 

Want to know more about our Shopify services? Have a look at our service page or reach out to us to see what we can do for you.