Meet Andy Gatenby: the senior architect behind Blueprint

Product configuration should feel straightforward to the customer. Making it work across product data, online sales, the till and staff-created orders is anything but straightforward.

That is the problem Andy Gatenby, Senior Architect at Visualsoft, has been working on with Blueprint. His approach draws on 22 years in ecommerce development, spanning in-house retail, agency work, SaaS platform development and Shopify apps.

Blueprint is the result: a product-options and configuration app designed to keep complex choices manageable across the Shopify storefront, Shopify POS and Draft Orders.

Twenty-two years of ecommerce problem-solving

Before working on Visualsoft's Shopify app suite, Andy helped develop Visualsoft's own ecommerce platform. At its peak, the platform supported around 1,000 merchants, many of them operating several sites.

That experience matters because complex product configuration is rarely just a front-end problem. The visible form is only one part of the job. Behind it sit option data, pricing, conditional rules, order handling and the different ways customers and staff sell the product.

“We already knew from building comparable features on the Visualsoft ecommerce platform how we would tackle the basis of Blueprint,” Andy explains.

That existing knowledge helped the team move from the initial idea to a working proof of concept without first having to rediscover the operational problems merchants face.

The gap that started Blueprint

The original prompt came through a conversation with Shopify. Product configurator apps were available for online storefronts, but comparable support for Shopify POS was limited.

For a merchant selling customised products both online and in store, that gap creates practical problems. They may need separate systems, reduced options at the till or a manual process for recording what the customer selected.

Blueprint was designed around a different starting point: one configuration template that can be used across the storefront, Shopify POS and Draft Orders. The controls adapt where Shopify's components differ—for example, file upload becomes camera capture on POS—but the underlying product setup remains consistent.

That gives merchants one place to maintain the configuration while supporting self-service purchases, assisted in-store selling and orders prepared directly by staff.

Read more about using one product configuration across Shopify POS and online.

Solving the data problem behind complex products

The part of Blueprint Andy found most interesting was Data Sources. It was built for merchants whose options cannot be maintained sensibly as a short manual list.

A ring builder may need customers to search and filter stones from a supplier feed. A bike builder may draw on a large catalogue of compatible components. In both cases, the configurator needs to turn a substantial source file into choices that remain usable for the customer.

Blueprint can import JSON from a URL or a manually uploaded CSV. The merchant maps source keys or columns to Blueprint fields, then uses that Data Source to provide option values inside a template. Imported values can be searched, filtered and sorted.

The architecture has been tested with datasets containing up to one million option values. That does not mean every merchant needs a dataset of that size; it means the feature was designed around the demands of substantial product catalogues rather than only small option lists.

See how the approach can work in a practical Shopify ring configurator built from supplier data.

Keeping the app flexible without making it feel bolted on

Andy is particularly proud of how Blueprint templates can be presented on the storefront.

“You could represent the same template in several different ways and have each one feel like rich functionality from the website itself, rather than an app dropped onto a page.”

Merchants can combine customer inputs, supporting content, conditional logic, image-based choices and additional charges around the needs of the product. Selected options remain attached to the base product, while Blueprint groups any additional charges into a customisation fee within the cart line.

The aim is not to make every configurable product look identical. It is to provide the structure behind the configuration while giving the merchant room to make the experience fit the product and storefront.

Our guide to conditional product options on Shopify shows how that structure can reduce duplicate products and unnecessary choices.

Building one app as part of a wider retail toolkit

Blueprint is being developed as part of Visualsoft's wider Shopify app suite. One current proof of concept connects Blueprint with Broadcast, our in-store visual merchandising app, so product options can be shown on a customer-facing screen at the till.

The proof of concept works and is due to be demonstrated at Sync, but it is not yet production-ready functionality. It provides a useful view of where the app can go: connecting the same product configuration to more of the in-store journey without creating another source of product data.

Improved onboarding and an integration with Shopify Sidekick are also on the roadmap. The team already has relevant integration work in other VS Labs apps, but these remain planned Blueprint developments rather than promises tied to a release date.

A product shaped by merchant problems

Blueprint started with a specific operational gap, but the thinking behind it comes from more than two decades spent building ecommerce systems at different scales.

For Andy, that means treating configuration as part of the whole selling process: where the choices come from, how staff and customers use them and what reaches the order afterwards.

That is also the direction for Blueprint's continued development—practical improvements around complex products, substantial option data and joined-up Shopify selling.

Explore Blueprint's features and pricing or view Blueprint on the Shopify App Store.