Ecommerce Case Study: How we launched a complex ecommerce platform in two months
December 14, 2022
Blog Post
December 14, 2022
Blog Post
Sign up to our mailing list by filling in the form below.
If you have any questions or need more info, let's have a conversation. Schedule one here.
Ecommerce platforms are often vital components for businesses to turn a profit, but the process of building and launching a platform created to deliver any kind of product takes time, especially if you’re launching the platform to a global audience and if you have unique technical hurdles that need to be overcome. At Cleverbit, we’re no strangers to complex ecommerce projects that need to be up and running as quickly as possible, and when we were approached by Nerve on behalf of their client, we knew what we needed to bring forward to the project.
Ecommerce has seen an astronomical rise in the West as a result of businesses expanding technologically and the ongoing changes to the global shipping industry. The shuttering of businesses as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of ecommerce platforms that could withstand a global event, and the rapid scaling of social media commerce to fit the demands of the consumers only added extra pressure on these businesses to hop onto the ecommerce platform revolution and build their own place on the internet to sell their products.
Nerve, a B2B tech agency that specialises in connecting the right people with the right projects, understood that speed and excellent functionality need to be at the front of any ecommerce platform launch.
The end-client needed the technical base of an ecommerce system that sells virtual courses and events, and they needed it launched globally and without delay. It also had to work with a complex booking system that needed to take into consideration an outbound sales team, and could keep track of speaker availability so the company could prevent overbookings and maximise revenue. Additionally, the client had multiple localised versions of the website in which they could sell their courses, based both in the US and the UK, and the ecommerce system had to work with all of them seamlessly.
The main priority for the client was to be able to provide up-to-the-second accurate information to their team in order to manage their bookings.
In collaboration with Nerve’s team guidance, we built a supremely flexible platform that subsumed their offline sales system and their existing booking system into one integrated platform.
To get the flexibility needed to work in both integrations, the platform was built using nopCommerce, an open-source ecommerce platform that is based on C# and .NET, and a speciality of ours due to its flexibility and capacity to support multiple integrations. For an ecommerce platform that needed to work with several different systems, open-source solutions that can be customised to extremely specific metrics and integrations is key to creating the functionality needed.
Understanding what limitations and specifications we were working with came first.
The rest was building the platform to the specifications that were set out during the initial meeting, which also evolved throughout the process.
We assigned three developers to work on it full-time, with the understanding that the entire company was at the disposal of the core team. Over daily meetings and scrum updates with Nerve, the platform quickly took shape, starting with long research sessions to determine what kind of ecommerce platform would best suit the project, the clear winner based on all the available information being nopCommerce.
After that, short workshops with Nerve were done in order to vet the front-end design that was to be the face of the ecommerce site. Our responsibility was to understand the design philosophy and provide a technical solution that would help them achieve their vision of what the website would look like.
The ecommerce site was launched successfully within 2.5 months from brief, with an additional month afterwards to add extra features that weren’t considered MVP.
CEO Michael Ward, from Nerve, said:
“I’ve never seen a project delivered so quickly – especially with so many complexities and variables that could go wrong. The rollout was a global one with localisation done for multiple websites in Europe and the US. It featured the integration of multiple systems, B2B lead generation capabilities, and a full ecommerce platform – all working together seamlessly from day one. All after only 2 and a half months of development. Truly impressive.”
Headquartered in Europe, Cleverbit Software is a prominent custom software development company, employing over 70 skilled professionals across the EU, UK and US. Specialising in custom software for business efficiency, we work with a diverse international clientele in various industries including banking and insurance, SaaS, and healthcare. Our commitment to solving problems and delivering solutions that work makes us a trusted partner with our clients.
Would you like to discuss anything software?
Here's our email:
[email protected]
Here's our phone:
+44 204 538 9855