Rock'n'Soil

Building a smarter Shopify experience for a product range that doesn’t fit neatly in a standard cart

Rock’n’Soil is a Queensland landscaping and garden supply business with a product range that’s beautifully practical - but not always simple to sell online.

Mulch, soil, turf, pebbles and landscaping materials don’t behave like standard eCommerce products. Customers aren’t always buying “one item”. They’re buying coverage, cubic metres, square metres, project quantities, delivery zones, product combinations and practical outcomes.

So the challenge wasn’t just to make the site look good. It was to make Shopify work harder behind the scenes, while keeping the customer experience simple on the front end.

The challenge

Rock’n’Soil had products that required customers to calculate how much material they needed before adding to cart.

For turf and coverage-based products, this meant working in square metres. For bulk landscaping materials, this meant working in cubic metres, with products structured across full and fractional cubic metre variants.

The existing calculator experience relied on a third-party tool, which added extra complexity, slowed the buying journey and didn’t integrate as cleanly with Shopify’s cart behaviour as it needed to.

Rock’n’Soil needed something more native, more reliable and much easier for customers to use.

What we did

We built a native Shopify measurement calculator designed specifically around Rock’n’Soil’s product logic.

For square metre products, customers can enter their measurements and the calculator rounds up to the correct quantity required. For cubic metre products, the calculator handles the logic between full cubic metre and fractional cubic metre variants, then adds the right combination to cart.

Behind the scenes, that meant carefully mapping product structure, variant logic, quantity rules and cart behaviour so the customer doesn’t have to think about any of it.

We also created flexible section settings so the calculator could be used in different ways across the site - either as a full Add to Cart tool on product pages, or as a results-only guide on measurement support pages.

Alongside the calculator work, we refined several product page behaviours to better suit Rock’n’Soil’s catalogue, including:

• native M2 and M3 calculator functionality
• cubic metre variant logic for 1m³ and ⅓m³ products
• automatic quantity rounding for coverage-based products
• cleaner Add to Cart behaviour
• flexible helper text and calculator modes
• support for product-page and guide-page use cases
• adjusted price display for M3 products, so products could show the most relevant first-variant price rather than an unhelpful “from” price
• template-specific product messaging for discontinued and out-of-stock products

Why it mattered

This is the kind of Shopify work that sits in the gap between design, operations and customer experience.

It’s not just “can we add a calculator?” It’s:

Will the calculator work with how the products are actually sold?
Will it add the correct variants to cart?
Will customers understand what to do?
Will the internal team be able to manage it without needing a developer every time?
Will it still feel native to the theme?

For Rock’n’Soil, the answer needed to be yes across all of those things.

The result is a more tailored Shopify experience that respects the complexity of the product catalogue, while making the buying journey feel far more straightforward for customers.

The outcome

Rock’n’Soil now has a more intelligent product page experience, built directly into Shopify and tailored to the way their customers actually shop.

Instead of relying on a disconnected third-party calculator, the site can now guide customers from measurement to quantity to cart with less friction.

It’s a good example of the kind of work we love at No.25: taking something operationally complex and making it feel calm, clear and considered on the front end.

Not flashy for the sake of it. Just thoughtful Shopify development that solves the real problem.