Tarter USA is a farm equipment manufacturer based in the US. They produce a wide variety of large tools, many of which are designed to be pulled by a tractor, and serve a very specific function in farming. Tarter Parts is a business line of Tarter USA through which they sell the individual parts that make up their products.
SpiderHouse got involved when we were asked to consult on Tarter’s efforts to make their extensive parts inventory available for sale to the public through the TarterParts.com website. After looking closely into several turnkey options without finding a good match, it became apparent that Tarter didn’t need a full fledged, third-party solution, and really just needed a smarter shopfront with some good logic behind it.
The Challenge
Providing Tarter with a solution meant creating new product pages in Shopify that react to a particular arrangement of product metadata. All of the products that TarterParts.com sells are parts of a finished product sold by TarterUSA. Three aspects of this solution were key to understanding and accounting for programmatically:
- Nesting products inside unsellable products.
- Associating a part to a number on a diagram.
- Handling sub-assemblies of parts.
Nesting Products
A full, finished piece of farm equipment can be bought at TarterUSA.com, however TarterParts.com sells only the parts. Each one of the Shopify Products on TarterParts.com are parts of something that is not for sale. For this reason, we needed to create ‘Finished Good’ products that a user is not capable of buying, but serves as a container for parts/products that are available to buy, and code a parent/child relationship to present the correct list of parts for a finished good.
Diagram Reference Numbers
Tarter USA produces many products, and those products use many of the same parts. However, those parts are used in different quantities, and different applications depending on which finished piece of equipment they are used on.
The parts diagrams are static images of an ‘exploded’ finished product. The individual parts are identified on the diagram with a reference number, and the product list on the product page is sorted by that reference number. That means in order to display the correct reference number, the product needs to know which diagram is being displayed. Consider that some parts appear on over a hundred different applications across the full inventory of finished goods, and this was a challenge to fit into a standard Shopify instance.
Since Shopify’s markup language (‘Liquid’) has no concept of a multi-dimensional array, this meant creating our own using Shopify’s custom metafields. We used one metafield as an index, and built logic to walk several other metafields, returning the correct diagram reference number based on the part number being displayed, and then sorting the product list by that.
Part Sub-Assemblies
Lastly, there are some parts collected into complete products that are for sale. These are sub-assemblies such as gearboxes where the gearbox is available to purchase as a complete unit to install on a finished good, but the individual parts of that gearbox would also be available for sale separately.
This sub-assembly relationship was achieved by creating a middle class of parts that were also containers. This sub-assembly class differed from the ‘finished good’ parts by also being available to purchase as a complete unit, with logic coded in to differentiate.
Job Completed
We rolled out a complete custom product solution for Tarter using nothing more than a Shopify account and some bespoke code. This solution is robust, easy for the client and their customers to work with, and incurs no further cost going forward.
Tarter Parts keep their customers farms running day-in, day-out.
