ArteComm — 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.
Duration: 1+ year
Technologies & Tools
- Ruby on Rails
- Elixir
- Phoenix
- JavaScript
- GraphQL
- PostgreSQL
- AWS
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 velocity. 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;
- Etc.
Much of the above was achieved by integrating the product with Gooten, a print-on-demand platform.
Team
Our team structure for ArteComm development
Back-end Engineer
Full-stack Engineers
Front-end Engineer
Team Lead
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:
- 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.
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.