Try our Perch Shop Demo

Shop Demo

While an online demo can’t show you how flexible and straightforward Perch Shop is to use, it can demonstrate many of the features that you will have available to you. Our demo site is for a fictional running club called Nest, and includes a Shop where club vests, memberships and a download of the memorable club anthem as an MP3 may be purchased.

The template and page code can also be found on GitHub, in order that you can see how the site was developed.

Products

The demo shop sells three types of products, each interesting in a different way. The first is a club vest. This is a physical product that makes use of product options such as sizes and gender fit. Each combination of size and fit creates a product variant with it’s own SKU, which is the product the customer actually buys. Inventory is controlled on the variants because each variant is a physical item in stock.

You can see the product variants within the control panel by going to Products in the Apps menu, selecting the Vest product, and then clicking on the Variants tab.

Shipping options also come into play when selling a physical product. Perch Shop helps you manage shipping to different parts of the world, and using different levels of service to do so. Note that the cart is also aware of when it contains items that need to be shipped. Unless you add a vest (the only shippable product) the cart doesn’t offer shipping options, and the checkout process won’t ask you for a shipping address.

Downloads

The second type of product is a digital download. In this particular case it’s an MP3 file, but it could equally be a piece of software, an ebook, a study guide, or any sort of file that you want to sell access to. Within a product in the control panel, you can access the Files tab where any files can be added. These files can then be offered for download to the customer once the product has been purchased.

Multiple files can be added per product, so in the case of an ebook it’s simple to add ePub, Mobi and PDF versions of a file for the customer to choose the download that suits them best.

Of course, this feature doesn’t need to be restricted to selling the files themselves. It can be used to offer downloads that only make sense once a different type of product has been purchased. For example, you could include a PDF of directions to a party once a customer has bought a ticket.

Memberships

The third type of product is a site membership. This is controlled through the Members add-on, which uses a system of tags to control who can access what. Once a user account is tagged, access to content, pages and files can be set throughout your site.

Within a product, go to the Tags tab to see which tags are applied to a customer when they purchase the product. Tags can have an expiry, so for our membership product, we’ve set the tag to expire after 12 months. After that time, the customer will need to renew their membership to retain access to the restricted content on the site.

Product tags don’t have to be used for controlling access. You could use them for customer segmentation or any number of purposes.