TarterParts Custom Shopify Product Pages

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.

I got involved when I was 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.

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:

1. Nesting products inside unsellable products.
2. Associating a part to a number on a diagram.
3. Handling sub-assemblies of parts.