Vendor specific pricing on Shopify

Question

A client of mine has a service-oriented ecommerce site on Shopify and he's asked me to assist in making a few changes. I've never utilized the service so I'm not really familiar with it.

The price list was static at first since the client used the same vendor however now that they're growing - and therefore using multiple vendors - the costs are fluctuating and therefore the prices on Shopify need to reflect that.

I need to set it up so that when a customer logs on a vendor is programmatically chosen based on their geographic location and the prices (shown to the customer) adjust accordingly.

Is this possible? And if so, what objects/API docs should I be looking at. I seems as if I can easily hard code this with IF statements but I'd like this to scale cleanly so I'm looking for a more efficient solution.

Answer 1

I think this should be possible. Based on your comment:

Will I not have a zip code for the customer? – RyanMac

The easiest way would be to create a Product Variant for each region. Based on the customer.default_address you could find the customers ZIP code. Next step would be to use this within the product.liquid template to select the correct variant.

Answer 2

The biggest problem you have is determining their location. When a customer logs in, you know who they are, so you could dish out only products of interest to them. Problem is, how do you lump people into those regions? You have your work cut out there. When you create a customer you can assign them any code you want, so perhaps you could just match customers to vendors using a match on that. Lump any customers into GroupA and you show only products with Vendor GroupA, any customers assigned to GroupB render products from vendor GroupB....etc