Development Food & Beverage

Nowadays

Compliance-First Shopify Development for a Regulated Beverage Brand

INPUT · THE CHALLENGE

The Challenge

Nowadays makes low-dose THC beverages - bottles, cans, and shots - in a category where the usual ecommerce build playbook doesn't apply cleanly. Every front-end change has to clear an age gate, order-level age verification, and legal review, and ad-platform rules constrain the tracking most standard integrations rely on.

Fresh off a migration to Shopify, the brand needed a development partner who could design and build inside those constraints - hardening the subscription experience without bolting on a third-party cart, keeping gross-revenue reporting accurate while still showing sale pricing, and bringing a young storefront up to accessibility standard.

STATUS · DIAGNOSING

OUTPUT · THE RESULTS

The Results

Nowadays now has a storefront built for its category: a well-engineered, accessible shopping experience where compliance, subscriptions, and merchandising work together instead of against each other - and a release process that ships changes safely on a regulated site.

With DYODE on an ongoing retainer, the team keeps testing, expanding the subscription experience, and launching new product lines on a steady cadence - turning hard category constraints into a durable commerce advantage.

STATUS · DELIVERED

The Approach

DYODE came on as Nowadays' ongoing Shopify design and development partner after the brand's move to the platform, running a managed monthly retainer with a structured ticket-to-scheduled-release pipeline.

Compliance-aware engineering is the default here: legal review is built into design approvals, age-gating and verification are treated as product surfaces, and releases ship off-peak through scheduled Shopify Launchpad deploys to de-risk go-lives on a regulated storefront.

What We Built

We rebuilt the navigation as a responsive desktop mega-menu and mobile drawer, designed One-Time vs. Subscribe & Save options directly into the theme's native slide cart (instead of adopting the subscription app's cart), and built a custom strikethrough "sale price" metafield that shows a discount cue while keeping gross-revenue reporting accurate. We also stood up A/B testing tooling and server-side Meta conversion tracking purpose-built for a regulated ad environment.

We also ran a full ADA accessibility remediation program across global, homepage, collection, and product templates, optimized the age-gate flow (so paid-media visitors land smoothly), and built compliance-aware content - recipe schema, back-in-stock messaging, and an in-content-commerce blog template that turns editorial into a shoppable, recirculating surface.

Subscriptions & Operations

Because subscriptions are central to the business, we scoped subscription engineering on Recharge - including a one-time product-swap middleware to give subscribers Skio-style flexibility - and audited the fulfillment flow that holds orders for age verification and payment, working to move it from a fixed timer toward event-driven release so valid, verified orders ship without manual intervention.