Full personalisation in Shopify for Nomige

Creating a custom design and website in Shopify was only the tip of the iceberg for Nomige. Behind the great looks is a profound database and custom app setup to manage their unique e-commerce business. Let’s discover how we have built this! 

Nomige who?

Dr Barbara Geusens founded Nomige after struggling with her skin for years. With unbalanced, acne-prone skin, she had tried numerous brands to solve her problem. None of them worked. In 2017 she started using the knowledge from her doctorate at the Department of Dermatology in Ghent to create a line of personalised products based on DNA and lifestyle.

Today Nomige provides different kinds of skincare, from day creams to UV protection, all personalised to your skin’s needs. 

Personalised skincare

So, as mentioned above, Nomige is all about personalised skincare. If you’re new to Nomige, you can’t buy any products on their website. You first have to fill in a lifestyle test, and then you can buy your first item.

With that first product, you’ll also get a DNA test kit. You just have to collect some cells in your mouth using the swab and return your kit. Next, a lab will extract your DNA to create an even more personalised skincare routine. 

The system behind the product pages is smart enough to recognise whether they already have your data. Based on your previous interactions with the website, the buttons on the website will change.

Personalisation can be something easy in e-commerce. For example, matching products to a customer based on previous purchases which is called product-based personalisation. But for Nomige, it goes way further, and we needed an external database to extract personalised information into Shopify.

Behind the scenes

The website of Nomige looks great but has a profound structure in the backend. The personalised products create a lot of data managed by Sumocoders. They made the whole backend of the website. It’s not just a system for the quizzes but also a database for DNA samples.

The data is then again used to calculate the skin profile, and the product will be created based on that. You’ll see that when you click on the quiz, you go to a different subdomain hosted by Sumocoders.

Our role was to create a product flow in Shopify for the customers and link the data from Sumocoders to the Shopify backend, which isn’t that easy. So we decided to create a custom app to make sure the data will safely be transferred from the database to Shopify to personalise each customer's account. 

How did we make the connection between the database and Shopify? We used extra meta fields to connect to the customers and filled those with information from the database. We also created different statuses to indicate where a customer is in the process. Did she answer the questionnaire? Did she give her a DNA sample? It’s a profoundly personalised process, but it was the best option for Nomige.

Partnership with Sumocoders

For this project, we teamed up with Sumocoders. They are an experienced development agency in Ghent. They are experts in building intelligent tools, web applications and websites that allow you to work more efficiently and have more time to reach customers.

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