Building software is a tricky business. Especially when your desire is to build software that provides extraordinary user experience to your customers. One day you think that you have something that will go to infinity and beyond, the next day you realize that you need to take few steps back and give a good hard look at where you’re really going.
Around two years ago we decided to take a huge step back. We realized that even though we were on track building a good product, it would never become awesome product that we have envisioned if we would have continued on the same path. With that understanding came the realization that we need to scrap almost everything we had built and start from the clean slate.
Fast-forward to today. We have almost fully re-engineered our core platform, created a full-featured API, redesigned the store management user interface, built a new server infrastructure, redesigned the checkout process, started building out developer tools for theme developers and added many new features to the store platform. The full list of changes would take too long to write and this is just a very brief overview of what we’ve done this far. Let me explain everything a bit more though.
Shoperb Core Platform — Completely Overhauled
Instead of a huge monolithic application we have now separated our platform into smaller pieces. This allows us to move forward faster and provide better general user experience for developers working with Shoperb Platform. We have as well built in a better fault tolerance that goes hand in hand with our upgraded server infrastructure.
Building Integrations with Shoperb API
Almost everything in Shoperb is now powered by API. It is more efficient to build internal features and in addition enables other developers integrate their applications with Shoperb.
Let’s say that you are using accounting software that we don’t support yet. No problems there! You don’t need to wait until we come around to build out the integration because you can let your own developers to build the integration instead — on your terms.
Don’t know any developers that could help you? No worries there either. Shoperb is backed by PerfectLine — an expert Ruby on Rails development agency. We will have your digital back covered!
Brand New Store Management Interface
One of our biggest hurdles in the past was building functionality around user interface that had very limited capabilities. Fortunately, we have now designed a user interface framework that gives our developers all the necessary elements to add new features more efficiently.
Not only is the look and feel brand new but the way we have built the store management interface is updated too. Shoperb Store Management is now built as a single page application using Vue.js framework (one of the fastest growing JavaScript frameworks today). You’ll notice yourself in a moment how fast everything is now.
New Server Infrastructure
Previously we were able to guarantee only 99.5% availability and had more single points of failure that I would feel comfortable with. We have restructured our infrastructure to a level where we have almost no single points of failure left and if something would happen then it would be on a scale where thousands of other applications around Europe would not be available either. Kind of like a force majeure type of disaster.
We’re not stopping there though. We have set our targets to increase availability of our platform by 50 times to the magical four nines. That is 99.99% availability. Once we have that target reached, our application would be true high-availability system.
Better Checkout Process for Your Customers
Number one thing in e-Commerce efficiency is making sure that visitors would convert into buyers. That’s why we are often running experiments on how we can improve our checkout process in a way that would make the shopping experience a breeze to your customers.
We have re-imagined the whole checkout process to provide more efficient experience to customers who want to use Itella SmartPost or Omniva parcel stations. Basically we’re setting the standard to ask as little information as humanly possible to process the order.
Build a Custom Theme with Shoperb Theme Editor
We are actively writing tools that would in the first phase make building a custom Shoperb theme a breeze. Shoperb Theme Editor (https://github.com/shoperb/theme-editor) allows you to sync your store to a development environment and then make all the necessary changes without affecting live store. Documentation for Shoperb Theme Editor is not quite there yet. That why we’re providing a technical support as well to outside developers.
That’s a whole lot to digest in one go so I’ll stop here. If you have any questions, then do not hesitate to reach out to us. We are excited for launching this new updated version of Shoperb and hope that it will serve our customers even better in the future.
