Crownlivin — reseller configurator for Shopify

Context

Crownlivin is a Malaysian furniture brand on Shopify with a table "mix and match" configurator on its own store. The brand wanted to become a supplier: let resellers embed the same configurator on their own Shopify stores, sell Crownlivin tables under their own brand and pricing, and have the orders flow back to Crownlivin for fulfilment.

The commercial rules shifted during scoping — who collects the money, who invoices whom, how orders cross between stores — so the architecture had to be proven before anyone committed to a build.

Challenge

• Money had to be collected in the reseller's own checkout, not Crownlivin's; the supplier only invoices the reseller.
• Orders had to cross from the reseller's Shopify into Crownlivin's Shopify as wholesale orders, after the reseller approves them.
• Each reseller sees only the product variants they are authorised for, with their own mark-up above a floor price set by the supplier.
• The configurator had to live on the reseller's domain with no iframe, adding to the reseller's native cart.
• The answer to "can this be done on Shopify at all?" had to come from running it, not from reading documentation.

What we did

Development

We scoped three revisions of the architecture as the client's commercial rules changed, then built a phase-zero proof of concept on two development stores:

• Product sync — the app creates a set of "Crownlivin parts" products in the reseller's store, limited to authorised variants, priced at the reseller's selling price.
• Storefront configurator — an app block served through Shopify's app proxy under the reseller's own domain; selections are added to the reseller's cart with the same-origin cart API.
• Reseller checkout — the reseller's own gateway, shipping and email, untouched.
• Order hand-off — an orders/paid webhook reaches our backend; after reseller approval, a wholesale order is created in Crownlivin's store with the reseller company as the customer and wholesale pricing.
• Two embedded admin apps were designed — supplier side (authorisation, per-reseller base cost, quotas, orders, reports) and reseller side (mark-up, quota balance, orders, reports).

Along the way we verified 18 platform facts against Shopify and Stripe documentation and recorded the seven pitfalls the proof of concept surfaced.

Outcome

• Proof of concept delivered: the complete reseller flow ran end to end across two development stores.
• The architecture was confirmed feasible, which allowed a fixed-price proposal for the full build.
• A locked list of platform constraints (one app per reseller store under custom distribution, Shopify resellers only for version one) went into the statement of work so nobody is surprised later.
• The full build is pending the client's decision.