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Shopify Product.Gift_Card attribute boolean check

Tonight being bothered by a Shopify attribute weird syntax.

Having a Gift Card product page, I want to show different UI vs normal product. I user product.gift_card and try to obtain the boolean value for the different UI. But I keep receive nothing.

Normally I try look up the product.json by adding .js at the end of the product URL. And I find there isn’t.

I have use line_item.gift_card for similar purpose, which give me expected value, so I am surprised I cannot get the expected value upon calling product.gift_card.

I connect with Shopify Plus support, and they typically say it should be my theme related rather than any regression in the system. Fair-enough~

Until a moment, I spot the product.gift_card in the developer doc has a Questionmark, i.e. product.gift_card? where that questionmark sounds to me to be a typo. But honestly not! It is the killer character that cause me fail to get the expected boolean. I cannot find another attribute has such un-usual suffix character. And I hope you didn’t struggle too long like me.

Related links:

https://shopify.dev/api/liquid/objects/product#product-gift_card
https://shopify.dev/api/liquid/objects/line_item#line_item-gift_card

Useful blogs for continue advancing as a web engineer

As a web engineer, you need to keep yourself advance, learning from giant tech company is a good choice. Here are some of the blogs I follow:

https://shopify.engineering/
As a Shopify Expert, no doubt I need to follow what’s happening in Shopify Engineer world. By knowing how they continue scale up the platform or any news in advance on storefront rendering will help me plan about my development for development opportunities.

https://netflixtechblog.com/
How can a over-the-top content platform and production company support operating their platform / video delivering to numerous video consumers smoothly and gather the statistic to come up a big data analysis, their blogs share such golden insight.

https://medium.com/paypal-engineering
As a new joiner of PayPal (since Aug 2020), I start following the blog to know more about what is happening PayPal engineers are working on to improve our customers and merchants end-user experience so as to achieve the great 2021 initiatives.

https://engineering.fb.com/
Although someone would say Facebook start outdate, or suitable to adult but not teenagers, no-doubt FB is a social platform that backed up various technical advancement. The contribution on GraphQL / MySQL and articles about their data centers are really cool to follow.

https://eng.uber.com/
Uber famous in how they handle the huge live-time data in organising every transport / car moving. Their articles about how they architect their system, money movement, how they use latest technology to empower their system and services are awesome!

https://medium.com/asos-techblog
https://medium.com/ynap-tech
As an ex-fashion company tech person, I need to be aware of how other fashion company tech advancement. ASOS and Net-a-Porter Tech blog are 2 majors source of Tech nutrients I would absorb from so as to learn what advancement we could adopt.

Although the content in the blog / Medium mentioned above could be quite backend side, as a web engineer (I am try step into an area somewhere beyond frontend development), it is challenging but also they are valuable resources to learn from them, which often got insight like something they probably have been failed for lots of time and finally got overcome the technical bottlenecks. This kind of insight are essential for excelling oneself to achieve higher technical advancement. If you not yet start having such habit, act now and build up such habit~

my FITNATURE is coming to town!

Today I am delighted to see Joemary Leung, a Personal Trainer, Online Coaching, starts her new business: .

MyFitNature is an athleisure brand for people to bring out their uniqueness through wearing our fitness wears. Joemary seeks for me assisting her to work out her business with Shopify, while the world is still concerning COVID-19 striking everyone business. She believes in her products and really look forward to share it with people who need it.

It is not an easy start to anyone, as investing right now is just like investing in an unknown result. Yet, I try my best to clarify her for questions she feel unclear about:

  • How online business works?
  • How Shopify works?
  • What is needed to run an online business?

I shared with her what cost would need for running a e-store, sharing the focus of her preparation and what else technical parts that I can offer my services.

We confirm the business relationship virtually at night around 11pm, the majority journey are through email / Whatsapp and Google Meet, until a week before the site launch.

Honestly Shopify platform cover most server side functionality and I focus on the visual / theme customisation to match brand identity. And also setup the related tracking, site launch preparation. And I believe the hardest part is the Shopify + Facebook Page integration, which is a headache recently when I work with various parties. There are problem screening over the Internet and we are not lucky enough to avoid this, resulting the FB related integration is delayed.

Thanks Joemary for her kindness patience and we work hard to finalise the site to get it well ready for launches and it is great the site can launches smooth in a sunny Sunday!

It is just the beginning, setting up a e-store is not hard nowadays with various tools and platform available. But keeping the business success in such a pandemic situation is challenging to every ambitious new merchants. I wish I can provide an affordable services to support my clients and help their business continuous grow with overcoming any challenges in such abnormal Era~

Celebrate again to the site launch of .

@my_fitnature

If you are interested about how to run your online store on Shopify, why people choose, or why I propose people to use Shopify, don’t hesitate to jot me a message or try out by signing up the 14 days trial Shopify Store.

Something about Shopify Support and Shopify Expert / Shopify Partner

Being a Shopify Expert / Shopify Partner, there are questions relates to this role often from my clients and my friends. And I try to share some and welcome feedback.

First of all, Shopify Expert are people who experiences and solid work history on various Shopify projects, across store setup / theme development / marketing and app development. I started my Shopify affiliate journey since 2014, and once reach 5 clients, I applied to be a qualified Shopify Expert. I also wrote a blog shared the reason for seeking Shopify Expert help for Shopify store setup.

For last 6 years, I have managed more than 10 clients, although I cannot work with each clients every moment. Yet I am open for them to connect with when they have questions for their store or even their business, act as a helpful hand if they seek for advices.

Shopify is a listed company, providing the SaaS E-Commerce platform which help store owner setup their store in a handy way. They do have a support team for handling various store owner issues. So they provide well documents to store owner / Shopify partner for theme / app / development etc. They have Shopify Forum for people to raise questions. Official FAQ system so as to shortlist common questions. And ultimately they offer Live Chat / Email / Phone call support. Although with various support channel, it cannot replace the need for Shopify Expert.

A proper Shopify Expert work with you for business, to help your business grows, care your difficulties and provide solution and even implementation. There are Shopify Expert who care dollar sign and initiate various development works, or someone like me treat freelancer as a personal habit for building various stores to help different business, or to learn how to do business by mean of offering my web development skills. Shopify Expert should have skill set in theme development, store configuration to facilitate the business, they work close to the clients and know their store well. Meanwhile, Shopify Support represent Shopify, they provide support which sometime requires investigation from backend, where Shopify Expert cannot access. Shopify Support often not close to your business, if you are unluckily, you may even reached out from a Shopify Support who mis-understood your issue and brought you walk through the garden and keep sharing information that not useful and off the topic.

A good Shopify Expert should be able to communicate well with the client in order to understand their situation better and able to think on behalf of the client so as to work out the things that work right to the client. I am not yet well in communication and time is the most scarcity item which cause me fail to commit some client raised demand, it is the problem of solo proprietor.

If you are a Shopify store owner. I look forward you can find your right Shopify Expert as a partner, they are happy to build a relationship with you especially if you can let them help you setup your store (as we have a little commission scheme as incentive to be active in Shopify community).

Win City Coffee

Welcome Win City Coffee launches with Shopify.

https://wincitycoffee.com/

WinCityCoffee is a Hong Kong based speciality coffee roaster since 2016. They source coffee beans over the world, having real visit to know the manufacture and their products to ensure the production is responsible and sustainable, and offers 3 collections to their customers.

Products – Signature Blends

Eric and his partner, Ben, approaches me and look for having the site run on Shopify because of the Shopify benefits that they heard.

I evaluate their business, where their website used to be hosted in Wix.com. I explained to them how the business work different between Wix and Shopify. The order fulfilment journey, the way to manage inventory, product setup, theme management which are all new to them, but they have picking them up. The store setup complete in a month time, despite there are some imperfect migration regarding the domain transfer, which add the complexity of the migration.

Now, with the fresh new platform, with proper site performance facilitates, I wish that help Eric and Ben run their business and able to have their roasted coffee beans deliver to people who love coffee.

Give it a try if you are a coffee lover!

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WinCityCoffee/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/wincitycoffee/

If you are interested in Shopify, follow this link (with my referral) to learn more about Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/?ref=gordon-chan-net

Number-33.com

Congratulate No. THIRTY THREE migrate to Shopify for their E-Business.

No. THIRTY THREE is a fine jewellery brand owned by Melissa; Crafted with the finest materials weave together an abundance of personal memories and fond feelings. I will assist No. THIRTY THREE for this transformation and aim to allow her business to share more success stories.

number-33.com
Number-33.com

https://number-33.com

Dropshipping – 1st attempt fail

After 2.5 month past, I decide to pause my store, My Quali Stuffs and re-strategise the way to go.

There are couples aspect that make me consider to pause:

  1. I get very low traffic
  2. I get opinion from friends that, the items I have in the store is fun, but won’t buy because of lack of confident
  3. The items are not unique, and price not competitive

But honestly those facts are just make me consider until I try experience placing a real order for a bag, to replace my own bag, and the experience is worse:

  1. I ordered a bag from AliExpress
  2. The order being processed after 3 days
  3. It takes another few days to wait for starting the shipment
  4. And it requires estimation of 20 days for delivery
  5. And ultimately …. I waited for a month and the items still not being received

This experience make me not confident enough to keep such business model. Hopefully my store does not gain enough attention and there are no order from anyone, so I am not suffer from any delivery issue or customer complaint. And I think it is not really a good start to just run drop-shipping without having a stable supplier to support your business.

Therefore, it is still not the end day of My Quali Stuff, I am just aim to tackle on the lesson I learnt: I need a stable supplier, so I am now trying to approach some physical store who does not have online store for their online business, I am trying to compensate what they miss and try leveraging my store as their online store, to holds their product online so as to attract more of their potential customers.

I hope I can come up some update soon : )

Gift with love – Hong Kong new Gift for baby / kids option

新網站登場,協助兩位女站長設立她們原在Facebook平台的生意轉戰到網店層面。她們的網店售賣澳洲入口的純天然嬰兒產品。包巾、安睡公仔,和暖色系和簡單的卡通造型是他們商品的風格。可作為朋友同事祝賀新生嬰兒的禮物選擇。

網站: https://giftwithlove.com.hk
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/giftwithlovehk/
IG: https://www.instagram.com/giftwithlove_hk/

Github remove Weak cryptographic standards

Since 23 Feb 2018, I find one of my work operation keep failing. In my workspace I have a Jenkins checkout Git repo which further run bower and Gulp for dependencies. It keeps saying Github fail to connect. The error say the HTTP protocol is not support, or cannot make HTTP connection. And turn out we find we fall to one of the scenario that our Jenkins server no longer able to get things from Github because Github disconnect the support of the following weak cryptographic standards:

  • TLSv1/TLSv1.1
  • diffie-hellman-group1-sha1
  • diffie-hellman-group14-sha1

Ref: https://github.com/blog/2507-weak-cryptographic-standards-removed

Since the incident, I aware the linux server we have for our Jenkins is already kind of old.

Turn out we have to upgrade our Linux to have latest openssl, libcurl and git using `yum update openssl libcurl git`

I though the story is about to end after my colleagues upgraded the changes. Another side of the workspace dev buddies start complaining the failure of building the application. And they are actually working on VM which is CentOS 6.

After checking, our VM has CentOS 6 with openssl in 0.9, git with 1.7.2 version, both of them do not support TLS 1.2 (the version that supported by github from now on)

Therefore the way to fix the issue is to update these modules. Sadly, updating them in CentOS is not straight forward, and here are some command I ran to get them upgrade:

Update openssl (you may need sudo):

# cd /usr/src
# wget https://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.0.2-latest.tar.gz
# tar -zxf openssl-1.0.2-latest.tar.gz
# cd openssl-1.0.2a
# ./config
# make
# make test
# make install
# openssl version

If you still find the version is incorrect, check which openssl to find which openssl is pointing at

Update GIT:

# yum install http://opensource.wandisco.com/centos/6/git/x86_64/wandisco-git-release-6-1.noarch.rpm
# yum install git

Hope this helps.

 

ref:

 

協助開店/尋找有意合作伙伴

若果你經已以 Facebook 專頁經營網上商店業務,有商品圖片、簡單商品說明/SKU,但未有正式網站來管理下單、發貨;對 Shopify 有興趣,想了解應用此平台作為你的落單管理/POS系統的話,歡迎來信查詢,小弟正尋找有意合作之平台/網店,我提供技術建議,協助你透過 Shopify 來優化你的網店業務。

若有意了解更多,不彷留言或 PM 接洽。