Custom eCommerce Website Builder

The customer’s platform is a dedicated website builder that allows photographers, artists, sculptors, and other creators to sell their works. It also provides promotional services, increasing the users’ revenue. It was growing in profitability and popularity but there were certain issues:

• Not enough speed. The client has two in-house development people, each consisting of five people. This was not enough to realize the ambitious vision for the project, where new features needed to be developed, tested, and released quickly;
• Limits. On the one hand, the customer’s development budget was tight. On the other, he needed extra coders with experience and knowledge to work on such a complex product, and these specialists don’t come cheap;
• Process optimization. The customer needed to restructure the way the responsibilities are shared between development teams. This would allow for more effective work;
• Personal. The CTO is an experienced programmer who directly contributed to the MVP version of the project. Now he wanted to focus on managing teams and getting value instead of actively coding.

Aristek was ready to join the project on short notice, offered reasonable prices, and had enough experienced developers. So the customer and we shook hands and got to work.

We were brought in to speed up the development, and so we did. In the first six months after joining the project, the Aristek team implemented the following:

• Merch ordering and status tracking;
• Accepting various currencies;
• Price adjustment according to the buyer’s geolocation;
• Adding custom images to merch;
• Improvements to image crop and rotation feature;
• Improvements to the admin panel to help the client’s employees be more productive, etc.

As this project was already working, we had to quickly adapt to the established processes. Given that the customer is technically savvy, arranging a streamlined development work was straightforward. We agreed on a slightly modified Kanban, as it would be a better fit for expanding the existing project of this kind.

This is how we structured the work:

• The customer sends us the initial idea for a feature.
• We investigate the possible obstacles and the ways that the feature can be implemented. The results are then reported to the client.
• A scope of work statement is prepared, mockups are created.
• The feature is developed, tested within a staging environment, and released to the end product.