Greetabl.com business streamlined by a custom Spree Commerce implementation & fulfillment integration
Gift Giving Taken to the Next Level
SPREE SUCCESS STORY
St.Louis based startup Greetabl is an online one-stop-shop for creatively-curated gifts and greetings that are personalized with Instagram photos, packaged and sent in just a few clicks.
The founders Joe and Zoë merged their respective backgrounds in business and design along with their entrepreneurial spirits to launch their gift platform. The venture turned out a success and soon it became clear and a more scalable and automated solution is necessary to ensure further development.
This project was a combined effort of digital brand and consulting firm B/C Designers who crafted the new Greetabl concept and the look, feel and UX of the platform, along with Spark Solutions Ruby on Rails Developers who jointly overhauled their digital platform with a complex ecommerce & fulfillment solution based on Spree Commerce
The Challenge
B/C and Greetabl worked together to develop a complete online gifting solution where the user, B/C coined “the Giver” could pick from a beautiful selection of boxes, add a gift from a curated collection of gifts, customize the package with a message and photos that would then be shipped to the receiver’s door.
The user could also send multiple Greetabls to different addresses in one quick and easy order! This new model required a complex customization of Spree Commerce to make this userflow possible.
The Search for a remote Development Team
B/C Designers sought a qualified technology partner to support the functional development of a Spree Commerce website.
Spark Solutions was one of several potential vendors to be shortlisted by the client, and they were approached and selected as the solution partner based on their demonstrated technical expertise and competitive pricing.
Once commissioned, Spark Solutions began to collaborate closely with B/C on the development of their Spree Commerce website, which required custom Ruby on Rails development, user interface / user experience (UI/UX) design (created by B/C), systems integration and configuration, and ongoing support.
The Process & The Solution
- Analysis & system architecture design
- Coding & testing iterative process
- Responsive Website Design and its implementation
- Production deployment & configuration
- End-product solution
As Spark Solutions works in an agile way the project was conducted in weekly iterations. The whole development process was a repetitive cycle of coders and testers working together with the client with the help of Spark Solutions project manager (PM).
It took 22 weeks to launch an MVP integrated with the external outsourced print on demand and shipping center.
Greetabl.com Features
- personalized product builder and custom checkout process
- single page React.js application as a responsive product builder ( desktop / tablet / mobile )
- custom checkout process adapted to Greetabl workflow
- great user experience
- mobile-ready clean layout and greatly improved user experience
- product sections pre-defining product builder elements for the user
- Limited Editions
- Holiday (seasonal products)
- outsourced order fulfilment and shipping handled with a custom Spree extension using subcontractor’s API with order status feedback and shipment tracking
- admin panel enabling
- products management
- promotion and promo messages management
- CMS for content pages
- general website configuration
- multiple fonts, emojis (even on desktop!) & special characters: Chinese, Spanish
- Digital Content Library enabling the users to browse and choose from a variety of pics provided by the admin.
- wholesale
- Greetabl Insider – a VIP Program, and get some amazing benefits including free standard shipping on all of your future boxes of happiness.
- Gift Cards – integration with Gyft which allows clients to purchase gift cards from a number of retailers, which are then printed on the same cutout that Greetabls are, so this process is handled by Greetabl from start to end.
- Rewards – credits can be earned with every eligible self-service order on greetabl.com.
- eCommerce multi unit ordering – users can easily duplicate their Greetabl builds and edit them directly in cart.
Tech Stack
- Ruby on Rails 4 with HTTP app caching & memcached for shorter page load times
- Spree Commerce 3.0 – probably the biggest implementation of the latest version in the world
- ElasticSearch for quickly searching and filtering millions of records
- Twitter Bootstrap 3.3 – for mobile-ready easy-to-modify layout
- ReactJS frontend with React-Bootstrap and Flux architecture pattern
- Haml, Sass, CoffeeScript – front-end components
- PostgreSQL, Redis – back-end engine
- Heroku – cloud hosting optimized for increasing traffic loads with automatic scaling up and down
Conclusions:
SPREE SUCCESS STORY
- Greetabl.com business was automated and streamlined with the right technology, user experience, brand platform and dev team.
- This enabled the startup to scale, fundraise and compete for larger market share as well as bigger ROI.
- New website was beta-tested and optimized for a few more weeks right on time for holiday season.
- With each weekly iteration of the development process – both pre- and post-launch – new requirements arise for UX or business improvement
