Summary
Mika's Shop combines a Shopify pet-products store with Mika, a custom AI chat, and customer-support services developed in Hermes. Visitors can browse by cat profile or product category; the chat is designed to guide them using the catalogue and site content.
Role and scope
I designed and built the storefront, from the theme, navigation and collections to localization, editorial content and launch. I also developed Mika's chat interface and backend, its catalogue and site-content tools, and the store's integration with the Hermes customer-support agent.
Problem and constraints
The store needed a clear way to match products to different cat behaviors while still preserving a familiar, localized e-commerce journey.
Architecture
Shopify provides hosted commerce, catalogue, localization, cart, and checkout. The storefront theme organizes collections by product type and cat profile, multilingual content, editorial pages, and customer information.
Mika uses a Python/FastAPI service with tool calls for product advice, catalogue search, stock, store policies and navigation links. A browser widget displays responses over SSE. A separate Hermes SAV service handles support requests, response drafts, operator approval and escalation pathways, with MQTT connecting the approval workflow.
Decisions and trade-offs
Shopify retains checkout and commerce while custom services handle guidance and support. Mika's tool set focuses on site information rather than order lookup or purchases. The SAV follows a separate workflow with configurable response routing and operator escalation; it is not the public shopping chat.
Security context
Checkout and payment processing use Shopify-managed flows. This case study does not claim a custom payment system or an external security audit.
Testing and verification
Public verification covered the homepage, product, brand, blog, guide, localization, cart-related controls, shipping information, returns information, and policy paths. No test purchase was made.
Public results
The public store is live with English, French, and German content, localized regions and currencies, product collections, editorial content, and a downloadable adoption guide.
Resources and links
The public storefront and dated bilingual GitHub case study document the shop. Mika's chat backend, browser widget and store-specific SAV integration were inspected separately in private source. No private code or customer data is published here.
Scope and current status
The storefront is public. Current production operation of the chat and SAV services has not been verified for this case study; no live chat, ticket or purchase was submitted during the review. Sales, conversion, traffic and revenue are not claimed.