This week's highlights: a major expansion of our multi-tenant reviews platform

TLDR: A major expansion of our multi-tenant reviews platform, a three-surface gift-with-purchase build for a premium hair wellness brand, a monthly VIP Staff Incentive Programme for a professional beauty distributor, and a multi-select stockist directory upgrade for a medical-grade skincare brand.

Some fortnights are about polish. The work is a quiet round of refinements that you only notice if you know where to look. This one was the opposite. A lot of the last two weeks went into platform-level work, the kind that takes a while to feel rewarding because the value compounds over months rather than landing in a single launch. Reviews, customer programmes, internal tooling, all of it got a meaningful push.

The thread running through it is that we are building less for one client at a time and more for the way the agency operates across all of them. A multi-tenant reviews platform, internal merchandising tools that any of our retail clients can plug into, a customer programme template that flexes for different rewards models. It is the unglamorous middle layer that makes the front-of-house work look easy.

This week's highlights: a major expansion of our multi-tenant reviews platform

Our in-house reviews platform had its biggest fortnight to date. Sixty-five commits in, and it is now genuinely competitive with the names you would usually pay a SaaS fee for. The work was split across the storefront widget, the admin app, and the multi-tenant plumbing that lets a single deployment serve several brands at once without any of them seeing each other's data.

On the customer-facing side, photos are now first-class. Shoppers can drop images straight into the review form without leaving the page, and the storefront widget pulls them into a horizontal scroll strip that opens into a Stories-style lightbox. We also added support for Instagram post and reel embeds, plus YouTube content, with auto-playing preview tiles that only fire when actually on screen. The lightbox crops cleanly inside the tile rather than letterboxing chrome around the video, which sounds trivial until you compare it to most of the embed tools out there.

The admin side gained a proper review detail page. There is a modal-driven approve, reject and reply flow. Drag-and-drop reorder for per-product media libraries. An offline-purchase review request flow for stockists who want feedback from buyers who did not come through the website. The customer journey from order to email to landing page is now previewable in the admin, so the team can sign off on what a real reviewer will see before flicking anything live. Behind the scenes, the email engine resolves brand-specific templates by Shopify storefront. The same backend can produce a soft, modern template for one brand and a more editorial one for the next.

There is also a slightly less visible win. A second reminder email for non-reviewers, with a preview toggle in the template editor so you can see exactly what the second nudge looks like. Reminder cadences are one of the levers that meaningfully lift review volume. Authoring both touches inside the same editor keeps the brand consistent across the sequence.

The whole thing is now running in production for several brands in parallel. Proper migrations have replaced the original quick-and-dirty schema management. Structured product attributes, video reviews, Q&A, and SEO surfaces all sit cleanly in the platform, with aggregate ratings exactly where Google wants them. It is a long way from where the project started.

Under the hood: a three-surface gift-with-purchase build for a premium hair wellness brand

The deep dive this fortnight is the gift-with-purchase campaign we ran for a premium hair wellness brand, featuring a popular mask as the freebie. The interesting bit was not the offer itself. It was that we had to make it behave consistently across three surfaces at once: the storefront theme, the back-office toolkit, and the checkout extension. Each one calculates eligibility slightly differently, and any drift between them shows up to customers as the gift appearing in the cart drawer but vanishing at the checkout, or vice versa.

The offer logic now supports per-currency spend thresholds. That sounds simple. It matters a lot when the brand trades in GBP, USD and EUR off the same store, with different price points in each. A £75 threshold in the UK is not the same shape as a $90 one in the US. The offer needed to qualify against whichever currency the customer was actually in. We also taught the back-office toolkit to qualify on condition groups or thresholds, not both. A campaign team can now pick the structure that fits the promotion, rather than always having to satisfy two conditions at once.

On the storefront, the cart drawer now drives gift-with-purchase eligibility through the same calculation the rest of the storefront uses for thresholds. The gift appears and disappears cleanly as the basket value crosses the line, with no off-by-one stutter at the boundary. The checkout-side extension was taught the same threshold language, so the offer behaves consistently whether the customer is reviewing their basket or at the payment step.

Worth noting if you are building anything similar. Cross-surface offer logic is one of those things where the surface area of the code is small but the surface area of the experience is large. A customer notices, immediately, when the gift is in the cart but missing at checkout. Sharing the calculation across surfaces is more work up front, and it is what makes the offer feel grown-up to the customer.

Other work this fortnight

A professional beauty distributor went live with a new monthly VIP Staff Incentive Programme. The kind of scheme where salon partners earn rewards for hitting specific targets each month. The claim flow lives inside the storefront with a branded hero and intro layout. Notifications route through the email platform, so the head office team can see in real time who has claimed and approve from inside their normal workflow. We also added VIP customer business names, role data, and a units-sold counter that increments automatically on approval. The distributor now has a structured record of which partners are actually moving stock, rather than just a contact list.

A medical-grade skincare brand's stockist directory gained a multi-select specialism filter on the storefront. A customer looking for a clinic that specialises in both anti-ageing and pigmentation can now combine the two rather than being forced into one bucket. We trimmed the defaults so the page loads with a sensible starting state, which keeps the directory feeling editorial rather than encyclopedic on first visit.

The quick wins

Plenty of smaller new capabilities landed alongside the bigger work. Our internal merchandising toolbox grew the first foundations of a proper Reports hub. That includes a Returns Analysis page, a product variant trend explorer with a size-by-colour matrix, and the early scaffolding for a multi-year forecasting suite built on daily inventory snapshots. The same toolbox gained a redesigned merchandising editor laid out as a four-column storefront-style grid. Bulk-select and multi-pin work directly from the variant explorer. Merchandising custom-data definitions are auto-created, so new collections can be set up without anyone touching the data editor. A beauty tech brand's new landing page gained an official logo, an animated 3D pulse hero, and some motion polish, before we trimmed it back to a tighter Hero plus ticker plus closer for performance.

It has been a fortnight of foundations more than fireworks, and that is a good place for the agency to be at this point in the year. The platform pieces that went live this round will quietly improve every brief that lands on our desk for the rest of the season. More next Tuesday.

Photo by Alex Jiang on Unsplash.