This week's highlights: a B2B trade platform for a premium hair and scalp wellness brand

TLDR: this fortnight was about selling in new ways. We built a full trade-account platform for a premium hair and scalp wellness brand. We added a service-first booking system for a high-end aesthetics group. We also rolled out pre-orders, German localisation and post-purchase offers for a fashion label, a luxury fragrance house and a farm-to-door food company.

Some fortnights have a clear theme. This one was about selling in more ways. Selling to trade buyers, not just shoppers. Selling to people abroad, in their own language. Selling to someone booking a treatment. Selling to someone reserving a product before it has even landed.

It was a busy two weeks. The work spanned beauty, fashion, fragrance, food and wellness. Much of it opens up brand new revenue, rather than polishing what was already there. That is the kind of work we enjoy most.

Here is the rundown.

This week's highlights: a B2B trade platform for a premium hair and scalp wellness brand

A premium hair and scalp wellness brand came to us with a clear goal. They already sell beautifully to individual customers. Now they want to sell to salons and trade buyers too. Wholesale is a very different way of selling. Most brands end up running it on a separate, clunky system. We wanted to avoid that.

So we built a complete trade platform on top of Shopify's own business tools. It sits inside the same store the brand already runs. A salon owner applies through a branded trade form. The team then approves or declines each application in a couple of clicks. Once approved, that buyer sees their own pricing, their own product range and their own way of paying.

The detail is where it earns its keep. Each company can be given its own price list. Trade prices can be edited in bulk across a whole range at once. Ranges can be tailored per company, so one buyer sees the full catalogue and another sees only their agreed lines. Pricing can flex by market too. A buyer in one country sees the right figures for where they are. Trade customers can place repeat orders on a schedule and reorder in a few taps. They pay on agreed terms, with a minimum order value. They can also pick up their invoices on dispatch and inside their account.

The same brand went live with a gift-with-purchase campaign as well. It offers a travel comb and mirror set, with the gift value shown correctly in pounds, euros and dollars. We also refreshed their consultation quiz. The opening copy is warmer, there is a cleaner path for people who want to skip ahead, and a tiered discount is unlocked by email at the end.

The result is one tidy store doing two jobs at once. The brand can grow a wholesale channel without a second platform to buy, learn and pay for. Better still, neither their customers nor their own team have to deal with anything unfamiliar.

Under the hood

For a high-end skincare and aesthetics group, we built a booking experience that follows how people actually decide. You choose the treatment first. Then you choose a time. It takes three simple steps. Most booking tools make you pick a slot before you even know what you are booking. That small reversal trips people up.

Each booking now behaves like a proper appointment. The customer receives a calendar invite. It drops straight into Outlook or Google Calendar, so the date is locked into their week rather than buried in an email. We added a capacity-aware party builder too. Someone can bring friends along with an "add more people" option. It only ever offers the spaces actually left in that slot. There is also a "request a treatment" route for anything that needs a quick chat first, backed by a treatment list the team manages themselves.

Behind the scenes, every booking flows into the brand's email marketing platform and their sales team's customer records. The right follow-up then happens on its own, and nothing is keyed in twice. If you want to read more about booking experiences directly on Shopify, we covered a related build recently.

Worth noting if you run anything similar. The biggest wins came from matching the order of the steps to how the customer thinks. They also came from making group bookings respect real capacity. Get those two things right and the cancellations and confused emails drop away on their own.

Other work this fortnight

For a contemporary wardrobe-essentials fashion label, we rolled out pre-orders. Customers can now reserve an upcoming product straight from its page, well before it arrives. An automatic shipping discount is applied to pre-order items. We also rebuilt their merchandised collection pages. Every product across multiple pages now shows in a single, properly ordered view. That matters a great deal when a collection is the main way people shop a range.

A luxury fragrance house went international in a more meaningful way. We added German across the customer-facing features that matter most. That includes the gifting "send a hint" tool and the checkout upsells. German-speaking shoppers now get a journey that feels native rather than translated. It is a quiet change with a real commercial point, opening the brand properly to a new market.

For a farm-to-door food company, we built a post-purchase upsell. Right after someone checks out, they can be offered a time-limited extra. The offer and its countdown are fully controlled by the team. We also bridged the brand's creator and affiliate discount codes into the buying journey. A shopper arriving from a shared link now sees the right discount apply on its own, with no codes to copy or remember.

A beauty-tech device brand gained interactive 3D product models. Rather than build each one by hand, we created a pipeline that bakes them automatically. It works from the brand's own source files, with the correct logos and lighting. A customer can now turn a device over and view it from every angle. The brand can also refresh the whole set quickly whenever the products change.

The quick wins

A handful of smaller pieces went live too. Our reviews tooling now fills in a returning reviewer's details for them. It also lets a customer submit several reviews in one go, which removes much of the friction that stops people leaving feedback. A speciality coffee roaster's product pages now show the real subscription price right on the add-to-cart button, so the saving is clear before anyone commits. And our internal production tooling gained a build pipeline for a seasonal lookbook mailer. A slow manual job now takes a fraction of the time.

That is the fortnight. Much of it is about giving brands new ways to sell, to new people, in new places. That tends to pay for itself quickly. As always, there is plenty already underway for the next one. More next Tuesday.

Photo credit

Photo by Huy Phan on Unsplash.