3form B2B product sample ordering enabled with a Spree Commerce cart and checkout with an ERP integration

Globally inspired, American made

SPREE SUCCESS STORY

3form is a Utah-based manufacturer of sophisticated building materials used by interior designers to create jaw dropping spaces. 3form website was a B2B product catalog with a contact form which architects could use to reach out to sales reps. Then 3form decided to use Spree to embedded a cart and checkout experience to streamline product sample ordering. Spree Commerce was integrated with an ERP to sync the product catalog and allow all 3form customers to use their existing user accounts. The project was delivered within 12 weeks by Spark Solutions collaborating closely with the 3form dev team.

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The challenge

“One of our goals for 2020 was to improve the process of our product sample ordering. Before, our users had to reach out to us directly using a web form to get in touch with our sales rep who manually took care of their product sample order. We wanted to avoid any manual work and remove bottlenecks in the fulfillment process by automating it as much as possible.” – said Jon Shurtliff, 3form VP of Information Technology.

The solution

3form decided to hire Spark Solutions at the end of 2019 to bring their vision to life. Since 3form product catalog website was built using Ruby on Rails, it was only natural to use Spree Commerce as their ecommerce platform of choice.

Delivery was conducted in agile 1-week sprints involving a team of designers, backend and frontend developers, quality assurance and project management pros from both organizations. Each sprint was concluded with a show and tell session for all key stakeholders. Feedback received during those sessions and iterative improvements introduced to the platform played a key role in delivering a service that met the client’s expectations.

The MVP phase took 12 weeks from kick-off to production launch. Two separate applications talk to each other using the latest Rails 6 features as well as custom API endpoints (GraphQL and REST).

MVP delivery insights:

a team of 4 developers, 2 QAs and a Project Manager
twelve 1-week sprints with demo session and sprint planning each week
ongoing cross-company knowledge sharing and architectural decisions by technical leads from both organizations
JIRA and Confluence used to improve asynchronous communication and provide visual cues for both the stakeholders and development team members
GitHub to manage the development workflow
a shared Slack channel to enable communication
dockerized development environments to speed up the dev workflow
a custom integration with 3form ERP system
3form user database shared by both RoR applications

User Experience

With the revamped samples purchase flow, users can easily order free samples of any product available for purchase in less than three minutes. All they have to do is go to 3-form.com, find a product they love – such as this beautiful Gild Gold – and place an order.

Sample shipping is currently available to the US and Canadian customers. Expedited shipping is available at an additional cost.

The custom ordering flow was quite easy to implement thanks to Spree Commerce flexibility and built-in product management system:

making all products FREE to all customers required just a simple promotion setup in the Spree admin panel
customizing layouts was quick and easy thanks to the brand new mobile-first customizable Spree 4.1 UX
Stripe Payments configured in minutes. Literally. Thanks to direct Stripe integration with Spree
Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce integration with the spree_analytics_trackers extension

Tech Stack

Spree Commerce 4.1 with Ruby on Rails 6.0 and the following gems:
- Spree Gateway
- Spree Analytics Trackers
React JS
Sidekiq
GraphQL
Docker
AWS
Systems health monitoring with self-hosted Papertrail, Scout, Sentry

Conclusions:

SPREE SUCCESS STORY

Combining the latest Rails 6 features, such as Multiple Databases with Active Record, with a flexible Spree backend, customizable Spree frontend and React components resulted in delivering the desired UX and business process automation in just 12 weeks. Project agile delivery and cross-team collaboration was a fun experience for both teams.

“During the development phase, the Spark team was great to work with! Interacting with the Development and Project management teams on Spark’s end was so easy – we collaborated by phone weekly, and daily on Slack. It was a perfect partnership and working relationship. Their statement of work was very detailed and followed closely, providing easy to understand timesheets and billing statements. We provided a very tight schedule and they delivered on time and a complete solution.” – said Jon Shurtliff, 3form VP Information Technology.