Oak Hall Cap & Gown
A complex transition from a custom platform to Shopify Plus
Oak Hall is the largest university regalia manufacturer in the United States, providing graduation caps, gowns, and accessories to over 1,800 high schools, colleges, and universities, and serving over 300,000 students per year
UI/UX
Shopify Development
B2B on Shopify
The Project
Oak Hall Cap and Gown partnered with BlueSwitch to transition from a legacy custom ordering platform to Shopify Plus. The goal was to enhance operational efficiency and deliver a seamless user experience for universities, administrators, students, and parents, while maintaining the ability to handle the intricate customization demands of Oak Hall’s B2B business model. The complexity of this project underscores BlueSwitch’s ability to deliver innovative, custom eCommerce solutions for large-scale B2B brands, combining technical precision with an understanding of complex client needs.
The Challenges
The Oak Hall project was a multifaceted initiative requiring advanced technical expertise, excellent bi-directional communication, and detailed project management involving numerous stakeholders, teams, and third party vendors. A few of the challenges we faced during the project:
Give Oak Hall internal teams the ability to create custom mini-sites for their university-customers, stocked with products that correspond to the specific needs of each school’s graduation events, giving students and parents the ability to build and purchase custom graduation regalia based on the student’s school, sub-school, major, minor, extracurriculars, and humanities.
Totally custom interface on frontend and backend, with multiple API and third party integrations with bi-directional capabilities, and a flexible dynamic customizer to give university-customers the ability to build custom product bundles from over 100,000 product- and variant-combinations.
Connect Microsoft Dynamics ERP to the Shopify Plus backend using a custom-developed API.
Allow 3rd party drop-ship vendors to retrieve order data and send back fulfillment data to Shopify Plus, with custom integrations for Media Clip, Report Pundit, and various shipping and fulfillment channels.
High volume seasonal purchasing - the site must be able to process 175,000 unique orders per month during graduation season, with multiple customer levels, dynamic payment, shipping, and product bundles, and seamless API requests from third party vendors.
Multiple shipping addresses, multiple payment portals, with pricing set by university-customers, and an access list feature that allows certain students to checkout without payment based on a predefined, customer-submitted list.
Access control list - Give access to authorized student-customers based on approval list that allows approved students to order only regalia specific to their graduation status.
Auto-fill orders - Pre-built bundles designed by university-customers, with optional accessories from a separate product list, all combined into a single cart that can then be shared with student-customers for order completion and payment processing.
Additional Features
With numerous custom API, an intricate tiered and nested customer account structure, and critical third-party integrations, the Oak Hall build would become the most complex project that BlueSwitch has ever completed. By leveraging BlueSwitch’s expertise in Shopify Plus, ERP, and custom web development, Oak Hall achieved a robust eCommerce solution designed for scalability and long-term success.
Custom Report Pundit integration to create custom reports based on dynamic line-item properties. We highly recommend Report Pundit for complex Enterprise reporting and data analysis.
Complex API integration with MediaClip for customized graduation announcements, diplomas frames, and printed media
Custom dynamic product bundles for 3 types of graduate: Souvenir, Rental and Custom – with variations depending on school, sub-school, type of degree, major, discipline, and humanities.
Oak Hall is a high volume retailer, receiving over 175,000 monthly orders during the busy graduation season. The site serves 1,800 schools and counting, with hundreds of sub-schools, thousands of majors, minors, and special considerations, and dozens of product types.
Unique product categories for faculty, administrators, ship to home, ship to school, graduate degrees, majors, minors, disciplines, clubs, honors, societies, military, LGBT status, country of origin, and legacy status.
Our Solution
Web components in a custom CMS that leverages Shopify Plus
Built with custom web components (similar to React) built on top of the basic Dawn theme, BlueSwitch developed a custom CMS that leverages the Shopify Plus eCommerce backend for payment, shipping, products, variants, and accounts, with a custom front end designs for PDP, PLP, cart, and checkout. The completed platform empowered Oak Hall to retire its legacy system, and they are now relying solely on Shopify Plus to automate critical workflows and provide a user-friendly interface for both administrators and end-users.
Custom landing pages with dynamic product bundling and access validation
Each of the 1,800+ university-customers required a unique landing page with tailored products, pricing, and shipping rules, and needed to support customizable product bundles specific to each school, sub-school, and degree program. Automating this process through custom back-end development and integration with Oak Hall’s ERP system (Microsoft Dynamics) was both labor-intensive and pivotal to overall success. Product data is dynamically retrieved from the Microsoft Dynamics ERP, with bundles reflecting variations for custom, rental, or souvenir regalia. To ensure only eligible students could make purchases, a validation system was implemented, integrating lists of student data with Shopify’s metafields and custom access control rules, ensuring security and accuracy.
Solving the complex issue of multiple shipping addresses
With tiered and nested customer accounts, the shipping logic for graduation bundles would have to be highly variable, accommodating scenarios where orders were either shipped directly to students or consolidated to schools. BlueSwitch developed a mechanism to assign appropriate shipping profiles dynamically. To sidestep issues with product variant limitations, we developed custom dynamic product bundles for 3 types of graduates: Souvenir, Rental and Custom – with variations depending on school, sub-school, type of degree, major, discipline, and humanities. For advanced backend functionalities, including event and accessory management, BlueSwitch integrated the Multify API, allowing administrators to manage event-specific configurations with ease.