Background

Vorhangschweiz.ch is a Swiss curtain retailer selling two completely different things: off-the-shelf ready-made curtains, and fully custom-tailored curtains ordered through a real-time price configurator. The store was managed by a DACH e-commerce agency, and they brought Abdul in as the sole theme developer for an ongoing engagement.

The Problem

The store ran on a heavily modified Flex 5.1.1 theme with a custom JavaScript configurator that had accumulated years of conflicts between Liquid, JavaScript, and third-party app code. The main made-to-measure curtain configurator — responsible for calculating real-time prices based on width, height, fabric, and suspension type — was partially broken.

More critically, three entire product types had no configurator at all:

  • Vorhangschiene (curtain rails)
  • Vorhangstange (curtain rods)
  • Plissee nach Mass (pleated blinds)

Customers wanting these products had to call or email to complete their order — a hard ceiling on online revenue. The mega navigation also couldn’t support the store’s complex product taxonomy.

What Was Built

Configurator repair and expansion

Abdul diagnosed and fixed the broken Massvorhang configurator, restoring price calculation, cart submission, and the ColdFusion API integration at apps.vorhangschweiz.ch. He then built three new configurators from scratch — one each for rails, rods, and pleated blinds. Each integrates with the same ColdFusion backend that duplicates the Shopify product with the customer’s exact configuration and returns a unique variant ID for the cart.

Product template architecture

Product type is detected entirely via Shopify tags across five distinct flows: Fertigvorhang (ready-made), Massvorhang (made-to-measure), Schiene, Stange, Plissee, and Zubehör (accessories). Delivery time parsing, fabric/configurator toggle, and Sperrgut (oversized freight) shipping tiers for long rail and rod products were all built in. Every configurator’s cart line item properties are structured for downstream ERP sync and sewing job PDF generation via Order Printer Pro.

Custom mega navigation

A block-based mega menu system was built from scratch using Shopify Sections 2.0, with 10+ custom block types: link columns, icon columns, step columns, filter sidebars, promo cards, CTA bars, B2B cards, and dividers. Full mobile sub-panel support with JavaScript cloning architecture allows independent mobile ordering per block, with per-block show/hide controls.

Results

The store now handles all product types end-to-end in Shopify — no offline fallback for any product. In the 30 days following the engagement, Shopify Analytics recorded:

  • CHF 55.5K total sales — up 42% compared to the prior 30-day period
  • Conversion rate from 0.74% to 1.03% — a 40% improvement
  • 189 orders across 16,700 sessions — 13% more orders

The agency can now manage all navigation content through the Shopify theme editor without any developer involvement.