Custom eCommerce website builder

Aristek helped develop an all-in-one solution for independent artists, designers, and other creators. The feature set gives the system a serious shot to challenge Shopify and BigCommerce in the art domain.

eCommerce

1+ year

Project background

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.

Solution

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

Tools & technologies

JavaScript

Ruby

PostgreSQL

Phoenix

GraphQL

AWS

Elixir

Team

Back-end engineers x1
Full-stack developers x2
Front-end engineer x1
Team lead x1

Process

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:

1
The customer sends us the initial idea for a feature.
2
We investigate the possible obstacles and the ways that the feature can be implemented.
3
The results are then reported to the client.
4
A scope of work statement is prepared, mockups are created.
5
The feature is developed, tested within a staging environment, and released to the end product.

Results

Our work was mostly geared towards expanding the product’s feature set and making it more attractive to users. As a result, the client’s customers saw an increase in their sales, a decrease in manual work, total automation of the sales process, and more. The customer is now posed to challenge major eCommerce companies like Shopify and BigCommerce in the art domain.

Custom eCommerce website builder

Project background

Not enough speed

Limits

Process optimization

Personal

Solution

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

Tools & technologies

Team

Back-end engineers x1

Full-stack developers x2

Front-end engineer x1

Team lead x1

Process

Results

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