Custom Development Archives | ISDK - eCommerce development, omnichannel solutions, CRM-marketing

Mar

Prompt support of a customer with a nopCommerce e-store

eCommerceadmin

Customer

A store selling rolling bearings

LC-Wälzlager is a German company specializing in rolling bearings. They sell products of European manufacturers as well as produce customer-specific bearings themselves. The company also offers its customers professional technical support.

LC-Wälzlager already had its online shop based on nopCommerce, however, there were some issues:

it wasn’t optimized for mobile devices
the site theme was outdated, which made the store look unattractive
the site was lacking good graphical content: pictures of products, catching banners

They were also missing ongoing support from the previous site developer.

The company came across our profile and decided to contact us. They liked our availability and prompt responses from our German team. We helped LC-Wälzlager to fix a crucial problem on their website even before the contract was ready and signed. Besides, we offered flexible support conditions, so they were able to choose the service package that suited them best.

To meet the customer’s goals and requirements, the following was done:

A completely new site on nopCommerce was deployed
A new site theme was installed and customized
All the data (catalog and text data) was transferred from the previous site
Additional custom functionality was also transferred and adapted for the new site
Creation of some stylish graphical materials (banners, slides)

To test the site and show the outcome to the client before rolling the solution out to the main website, we started with the staging site and deployed all the functionality there.

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The customer also asked for further store support. During that, we helped the company to set up SSL, adjusted search options, and introduced some other useful features.

When creating an online store, we always start with a staging site, so that clients could examine how the store functions and approve when they are happy with everything. After that, we transfer the functionality developed to the official site. This minimizes bugs and helps to make all the settings and changes in a secure environment.

We also offer flexible conditions for further site support based on a ‘Team as a service’ approach. A client purchases a package of service hours. We then provide an estimate for what can be done within this package.

Along the project run or website support, we regularly inform the client about the work progress and remaining hours. This helps customers keep track of their budgets quite easily.

Aug

MVP app to test an E-Commerce business idea in 3 weeks

eCommerce, Mobileadmin

Customer

MRO parts provider

The client was looking for ways to make shopping easier, and hense, increase the conversion. One of the ideas to reach this goal was that adding items from a printed catalogue by simple scanning of a barcode will remove the barrier of cross-platform shopping and lead to more sales.

To test this idea, the company wanted to create an MVP of a mobile app through which the products would be scanned and added to a cart.

It was especially important for the customer to get this MVP as quickly as possible to be able to see first results and grow further the mobile store functionality based on these results.

To test the business idea, iOS and Android apps were created. The apps have a login screen, three onboarding screens, and the main screen. On the main screen, users may choose to scan the barcode, or to proceed to the cart on the site. When the barcode is scanned, it is automatically being added to the cart.

The apps were connected to the existing e-store of the client, built on nopCommerce platform.

For the cross-platform development we used Xamarin technology.

MVP-format iOS and Android apps to test the business idea were created in less than 3 weeks.

Jul

iOS app with Apple in-app subscriptions and purchases

eCommerceadmin

Customer

A shop selling handmade artisan products

GlobeIn, an online store of handcrafted artisan products uses 2 business models:

a membership-based shop with monthly in-app subscriptions allowing users to access the unique sales, and
subscription boxes with a separate payment model based on the set of the goods delivered to the client every month.

An app for subscription boxes was already created (view the case), following that, the company decided to create a version of the app for the shop as well.

The idea was to attract users with Facebook ads and direct them to the right version of the app depending on which ad it was, for subscription boxes, or the store.

To access the store, one needs to become a member. Users also should be able to become members and use the store without registering.

To get an idea, what the store looks like, before paying the membership fee, a user should be able to try a demo version of the store.

The membership and the purchases within the app should be paid using StoreKit framework for iOS In-App purchases. Ads Facebook and AdWords traffic to be handled by Adjust device fingerprinting technology.

To meet the customer requirements, the following was done:

Redirect from a Facebook ad to the iOS store
- Adjust is used to redirect users from Facebook ads to a corresponding version of the app
- The Fingerprint of the device is stored on the Adjust server and is used to remember the “users-app” pair and open the same version of the app next time

Preview of the store
- A demo store directing to the membership registration page once the user clicks on checkout
Membership registration
- To register their membership and download the app, users need to enter their Apple ID
- To pay the membership fee, the Apple wallet is used. For in-store purchases, the official Apple StoreKit framework is applied
- In case a user doesn’t want to register to use the store, (s)he can click “Not now” button on the sign-up page (the membership fee must be paid anyway). A “ghost” account connected to the user’s subscription is being created. When this user will decide to register, the membership subscription will be reconnected to the current e-mail.
A store app with features of the webstore

iOS application that replicates website features:

Purchase and checkout flow:
- Payment methods: Credit Cards, PayPal, and ApplePay
- Braintree technology to accept credit cards payments
- Automatic address detection at the checkout
Account functionality
- Buy items in the store
- Track shipment
- View order history
- View/update settings and billing details
- Restore purchases
- Change account data: username, password, shipping address

To track app performance and marketing metrics, the following tools were incorporated into the app:

Appsee – an app analytics platform enabling user recordings, touch heatmaps, and extensive user journey tracking to understand the reasons behind the user behavior.
Mixpanel – an analytics platform for the mobile and web, supporting businesses to study consumer behavior.
Adjust – analytics, measurement, and fraud prevention solutions for mobile app marketers.
Snowplow – a data delivery platform that collects and operationalizes behavioral data at scale.
Customer’s own server analytics

View in Apple Store

Jun

Subscription boxes iOS app set up for marketing campaigns

eCommerceadmin

Customer

A shop selling handmade artisan products

GlobeIn is an online store of handcrafted artisan products that also offers subscription-based curated boxes.

With a website already in place, the company decided to create an iOS app to increase the number of subscribers.

The founders wanted to check their assumption that sales in the app would be higher than on the website. The main task for the app was to clearly and in a very attractive way convey the main value of the subscription to users so that they would opt for it.

The company was also planning to actively use the app for its marketing campaigns. Thus, another important requirement was to implement analytic tools to measure traffic and track user journeys and overall user activity. The client wanted to use these analytics to find ways to increase conversion rates.

For the app to fulfill its main goal, the following was done:

Account’s interface with very simple and quick access to its sections and subscription upgrade benefits
Various upselling feature, including an engaging onboarding process aiming to motivate users to spend extra on upgrading their subscription and/or purchasing add-ons
User feature to manage subscription settings like box theme and some others (1-10 days of each month)
User feature to redeem subscription exchanging the box for the credits in order to buy add-on items instead
VIP sales (12-18 days of each month) for extra funds

To track app performance and marketing metrics, the following tools were incorporated into the app:

Appsee – an app analytics platform enabling user recordings, touch heatmaps, and extensive user journey tracking to understand the reasons behind the user behavior.
Mixpanel – an analytics platform for the mobile and web, supporting businesses to study consumer behavior.
Adjust – analytics, measurement, and fraud prevention solutions for mobile app marketers.
Snowplow – a data delivery platform that collects and operationalizes behavioral data at scale.
Customer’s own server analytics

Features of this iOS mobile application:

Subscription description start screen (for new users)
Subscription purchase and checkout flow:
- Payment methods: Credit Cards, PayPal, and ApplePay
- Braintree technology to accept credit cards payments
- Automatic address detection at the checkout. This functionality is estimated to increase the conversion by 4%
New subscriber’s welcoming flow (5 steps)
- Congratulation screen, “Thank you for subscribing”, Step 1…Step 5, conclusive “Thanks screen”
“My subscription” account functionality
- Choose box theme
- Track monthly shipment
- Upgrade to higher subscription tiers
- Collect credits and redeem boxes (exchange for credits)
- Within a given period, buy add-on items in the internal store (not Artisan Shop):
  - Pick any add-ons (items) from an internal catalog: Jewelry, Accessories, Home, Kitchen, Beauty, Food
  - Items will be added into the monthly shipment along with the regular box
- Participate in monthly VIP sales
- View order history tracking
- View/update settings and billing details
- View subscription timeline of the current month
Zendesk chat incorporated into the app

Other functionality or static content incorporated into the app but implemented using incorporated web view or external browser links:

Artisan shop and its order history tracking
Maven reward points
Subscription purchase and checkout flow
Help and FAQ information
“Impact” public files

View in Apple Store

Mar

nopCommerce multi-store for a book publisher

eCommerceadmin

Customer

One of the largest Russian publishing houses specializing in literature for school education

The company already had an online store for individuals, which was integrated with corporate systems: Bookkeeping system and Microsoft Dynamics ERP.

New business development plans required creating an online store for legal entities and public educational institutions. Product range and prices in this store were supposed to be different from the ones on the main site, tier pricing functionality was also needed to be implemented. Another requirement was that users of this site – various companies and organizations – needed a different type of authorization.

In addition to the main task, some issues with the existing repository needed to be solved: code branches required accurate merging as the proper procedure for deploying them to the test and production stages has been violated.

First of all, the repository issue was solved by analyzing each of the code branches and comparing it to static and dynamic (dll) content of deployed solutions on test and production sites.

Second, to complete the main task, ISDK tuned nopCommerce ’multi-store’ functionality. This is an inbuilt feature of all nopCommerce-based shops, which allows to host more than one frontend store on different domains yet manage them all from a single administration panel and have a single database.

Tier prices were also set up. Tier prices allows to offer discounted prices when customers buy bigger amounts of a product. In nopCommerce, it is possible to set up tier prices for different stores and different customer roles.

A separate virtual store for organizations was set up
Different price lists were created. The lists contain different prices depending on a client type and role
Bookkeeping system and Microsoft Dynamics integrations were updated accordingly

Feb

nopCommerce-upgrade-case-featured-400-200

nopCommerce Upgrade to .NET CORE

eCommerceadmin

Customer

Theater and stage equipment supplier

STEFCO is one of the leaders on the Russian market of theater and stage equipment supply, equipment for entertainment and sporting events. It works with the best manufacturers, such as Harlequin, Tuchler, Gerriets, Milos, ShowLED, Chain Master and others. The company delivers the facilities and does the installation.

Stefco was looking for ways to increase its profits and expand sales. As a part of this plan, the decision was to upgrade the company’s web-store to the latest 4.10 nopCommerce version supporting .NET Core with further intention to migrate the shop to Linux hosting.

STEFCO had a few requirements to the new site:

Improvement of the admin area (more user-friendly with better responsive design)
A possibility to migrate to Linux hosting in future
Better in-store pickup support
Performance optimisation

While planning the upgrade, two significant challenges were identified:

nopCommerce source code and database of the existing site (on nopCommerce 3.70 version) was considerably modified, which made it impossible to upgrade using the normal process
Custom plugins required additional modifications to be compatible with the new version of nopCommerce

See the website: STEFCO >>

ISDK team analyzed the store version used before to find out nopCommerce source code changes. Third-party plugins were checked as well. The areas that required an action to be taken were identified, the following activities needed to be performed:

Implement custom SQL scripts to make a copy of the database without custom modifications
Move all customizations from nopCommerce source code to custom plugins
Review and update existing custom plugins to support the new version of nopCommerce
Perform regular upgrade process from updated 3.70 setup to 4.10 using upgrade scripts
Change custom theme and plugins configuration settings after upgrade to reflect changes in nopCommerce platform and to use new features available in new versions of the theme and plugins

The challenges that were initially discovered, were successfully solved and the transition from 3.70 to 4.10 went very smoothly. While performing the upgrade, all data and settings were persisted and traffic loss was minimal. The requirements outlined by STEFCO were met, the store is now also ready for future migration to Linux hosting.
This case reflects well-known issues related to the nopCommerce source code and database customization that cause difficulties with a regular upgrade process and require extra activities before starting an upgrade. At the same time, it demonstrates how using built-in nopCommerce plugin system can be successfully used for such customizations.

Apr

E-Commerce Omni-Channel

eCommerce, Integration, Mobile, UI-designadmin

Customer

GLOBAL PRODUCER OF WELL-BALANCED NUTRITION, WEIGHT CONTROL AND BEAUTY GOODS

Herbalife, a worldwide-known producer of nutrition, weight control, and beauty goods, together with Filuet Group, its logistic partner, expands into Eastern and Western Europe.

Entering CIS and Baltic countries’ markets, the customer wanted to introduce a new strategy for market expansion, which proposed an intense use of modern e-Commerce tools. They wanted to create a system of sales channels that would include a single web-store for all new business regions, mobile applications for popular platforms (iOS и Android), and a network of automated self-service kiosks (touch screen terminals). All solution components were supposed to use a single data source as well as centralized content administration tools, and configuration settings pool.

The planned online operations needed to be fully integrated with the existing offline business process of orders processing and delivery.

See customer feedback

The Omnichannel solution required a combination of several external and internal corporate tools, integration with Herbalife ERP system and Filuet Group logistic applications. nopCommerce, a leading Microsoft .NET based solution, was chosen as an e-commerce platform as its plugin-extendable architecture using Dependency Injection pattern provides almost unlimited system integration capabilities.

The following tasks were completed within the project:

design and development of an online-store;
design and development of mobile applications delivering full cart and order sync with the online-store;
integration of the e-commerce channel with the existing offline architecture of order processing, pricing, warehouse stock tracking etc.;
Filuet Group shipping widget embedding;
integration with payment systems, addition of new payment methods using online banking;
integration of e-commerce with vending channels (kiosks, automated sales stores);
implementation of chat bots for customer support.

The system is fully hosted on Microsoft Azure using one of the standard cloud service plans which ensures good stress resistance. This helps the system to show adequate performance: in peak times the site auditory might go up to a few thousands.

Herbalife users got a completely integrated shopping environment. This allowed to increase the number of customers and the average sum of their orders significantly. Customers now can access their carts from all devices, order history is centralized and shows all orders, including offline. For example, an order can be put together in the mobile application while final checkout can be done later via web-store personal account or vice-versa.

The company saw increased customer loyalty, boost in sales revenue and endless opportunities of using marketing technologies – retargeting, upselling, cross-selling, CRM marketing etc.

Jun

SharePoint Tablet App

Custom development, Mobile, SharePoint, UI-designadmin

Customer

RUSSIAN TELECOMMUNICATION HOLDING COMPANY THAT OFFERS A WIDE RANGE OF SERVICES INCLUDING BROADBAND AND MOBILE INTERNET ACCESS, TELEPHONY AND DIGITAL TV

Client management was looking for a long time possibility of a high-level integration center for project and process tasks accompanied with the easy to use KPI dashboards. Besides that, top management wanted not only integration on its own but also easy to use aggregated information visualization tools and quick functions (task assignment, commenting, and attachments).

Ultimately, this solution was supposed to be implemented within the scope of corporate Internet portal upgrade and migration to SharePoint Server 2013 (due to the fact SharePoint became an integration center itself). Customer also planned automation for some of its internal business services and that was a good point as well to develop a desirable integration center and its services.

One of these services was a module for integration of investment planning, technical projects and billing systems. Main business users of this service are company top managers. Certain challenges included the need to integrate data from independent systems in single information space. Systems were not designed for such integration either technically or logically (from business models perspective).

Another key goal (above integration) – as highlighted in the very beginning – was to get lightweight mobile client for company top management. The idea was to gather and aggregate all key information for current projects and top-level tasks. Top managers wanted to have analysis tool accessible from tablets and wide format devices.

To achieve the set goals, project included the following tasks:

Integration and aggregation of data from disparate IT systems
Creation of a single task center based on Microsoft SharePoint corporate portal
Development of a visualization and monitoring tool for key programs and project and their KPIs
Development of a mobile client for tablets and wide-format devices allowing to show key aggregated data and KPI on dashboards and do quick task assignments

Technically solution was developed using Devexpress Devextreme HTML5 application development platform (https://js.devexpress.com/). This platform is a large collection of JS/HTML components for building interactive and lightweight Web applications responsive for both common laptops and modern tablets and mobile devices.

We used the following components:

DataGrid
Charting Widgets
UI Widgets (main UI building blocks)

Data exchange and work logic of HTML5 components is standard – call (usually asynchronously) for Web services located on a company’s SharePoint portal.

Developed solution allowed integration of 3 key corporate systems that were complete disparate before. System provided top and middle management with single tool for analysis and management of project and technical tasks. In total system monitors more than 200 projects and program tasks.

Mobile client for tablets includes dashboards for aggregated project information – target KPIs and dates, actual statuses and key issues with the ability to quickly create and assign tasks. Average mobile application response time with stable Internet connection is 1 second or less.

About 20 top and middle-level company managers including its president use this system.

May

RF Equipment Control System – Development and QA

Business applications, Custom development, Testing and QAadmin

Customer

Russian tele- and mobile communication company

When improving and expanding its base stations network customer decided to automate new radio-frequency equipment database maintenance (data entry and verification). Project goals were as follows:

Store information about 2G, 3G, 4G, radio-relay, wireless access equipment in structured digital form;
Store documents from legal authorities in structured form;
Paper-less interaction between customer and legal authorities for obtaining results of findings and examinations;
Automation of legitimacy checks for radio frequency resource usage;
Unified reporting;
Control of user access to information.

Contractor in this project was one of the leading IT system integrators in this segment. Its employees designed main system architectural concepts and developed UI mockup.

Then they subcontracted ISDK (proved itself as reliable partner in previous projects) for development of certain system modules. We did not only development but also significant amount of system testing prior to Go Live of the system.

System testing was divided into two large phases: preparation and approval of test cases, and functional testing itself.

System and its modules development took 6 months. Then for 1.5 months the system was tested and changes were made based on testing results and results of acceptance by customer.

Technically system modules were developed using .NET platform and its Web user interface – using ASP.NET MVC.

Within QA stream more than 40 test cases of different level of details were developed and approved. Functional testing was done mostly in manual mode but some key tests were automated which allowed to save time in Go Live phase.

ISDK had 5 people in the project’s team: 3 developers and 2 analysts-testers.

Apr

Bank SharePoint Portal. Employee Surveys

Analysis and design, Custom development, SharePointadmin

Customer

Russian bank, in the TOP-10, with large branch network over the country

Bank has more than 20 thousand employees. As a part of corporate portal development, there was a need to implement survey service for employees who use this portal.

Service development goal was to obtain flexible and customizable tool for survey creation and execution as well as survey results reporting.

Standard SharePoint platform functionality was not enough for that task because of the lack of needed customization capabilities.

Specifics of this project included the following requirements:

IE8+ browser support;

Capability to customize look and feel of each separate survey: page and column splitting, question sequence setup;
Ability to create answer validation rules;
Creation of several question types not existing in SharePoint;
Ability to add pictures into survey;
Percent of completion indication;
Report creation

Project development and implementation included the following:

System architecture, functional and graphical design works. Deliverables – functional UML diagrams and UI mockups;
System is based on standard SharePoint survey functionality but survey content was enhanced to load survey visual settings during survey loading;
Standard survey template is transformed using JavaScript and web services;
Visual representation of each survey can be set up using newly developed administration page. Then this representation is saved into a file;
It is possible to customize visuals for each separate question like showing answer options in a row or in a column and setting indentation;
Answer validation rules are applied using JavaScript;
DevExpress was used to develop reports on user survey passing with per-department analytics. This required integration with other portal module which stores organizational structure information;
Development of user and administrator documentation;
Customer key users training;
Full system testing, go live and putting system into full production mode.

System was deployed into corporate portal in autumn 2015.

This development significantly extends existing SharePoint survey functionality and makes it lot easier to create new surveys and analyze their results.