USA
Dedicated Web Development Team for Ankorstore
Sigma Software dedicated web developers reinforced Ankorstore’s engineering team and supported the Client with extending & optimizing the marketplace that unites 300K retailers in 33 European countries
Customer:
European B2B marketplace
Business needs
E-com domain is highly competitive. You need to be fast: deliver new features, improve UX, and adapt to market changes. Ankorstore planned not only to keep pace but to be on top of it. So, they started looking for a reliable technical partner who would help to scale their development team.
Result
Partnership with the Sigma Software web development team helped Ankorstore grow their product development capacity, improve the core platform functionality, reduce manual efforts, and optimize costs on infrastructure & 3rd party solutions integrations, just to name a few.
Working with Sigma Software has been amazing
Collaboration overview
Key facts
The dynamic E-com industry puts a lot of pressure on suppliers in terms of web apps robustness, performance & usability. Ankorstore had an ambitious product roadmap and needed more experts to keep up with it. As in-house hiring was time-consuming, they decided to turn to a nearshore supplier who could extend their web application development team in short order.
We perfectly matched Ankorestore’s hiring & development speed expectations, easily adapted to the Client’s ways of working, and suggested improvements where applicable. To date, we have successfully delivered web development, design, and DevOps expertise, helping our Client with:
- R&D activities, including analysis, research, and PoC evaluation
- Web development for the company website and the marketplace
- On-demand UI & UX design consulting
- DevOps support and maintenance
Improvements Delivered
We began our collaboration with the pilot project — company’s Careers website development that included architecture configuration, information pages redesign & 3rd party system integration. The pilot was a success and after its release Ankorstore engaged us to work on the marketplace improvement.
The number of platform users has been growing fast and already reached 30K brands & 300K retailers. It was challenging to keep the platform stable yet provide the exceptional user experience. Our engineers worked closely with the Client’s team contributing to platform sustainability improvement, manual efforts reduction & cost optimization:
- Built integrations with a set of payment (e.g. Stripe, PayPal, SEPA) and ~20 shipping (e.g. FedEx, DHL, Royal Mail) systems
- Developed automatic import of goods & products to reduce manual efforts
- Upgraded UI/UX of the marketplace Home page and performed full redesign of the brands’ landing pages (this allowed to increase retailers’ signups by 80%)
- Introduced the solution yielding 30% cost decrease on 3rd party translation tool
- Improved the signup flow and optimized the user registration form that allows to fill in extensive user information in just a few clicks
- Improved the customer claims form by extending it with attachments and a pre-set list of products to choose from, all of it according to the new design
- Featured the built-in messaging tool with new functionality allowing to add attachments, sort by date, and initiate dialogs with certain contact
Dedicated DevOps
Together with the Client’s technical team, our DevOps engineers follow the best practices that include GitOps approach and extensive IaC usage to streamline the development process as well as standardize and automate changes made into the infrastructure.
Cost optimization was another vector our team focused on. Together with the Client’s team we analyzed the existing processes and implemented improvements that allowed reducing expenses and optimizing the infrastructure. Our DevOps engineers contributed to the following activities:
- Company’s Careers website infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines setup
- New stateless authentication system configuration for easy & secure sign-on
- Cost optimization including time-based scaling and non-production cluster migration to (Spot) Preemptible instances (70% cost cut)
- Resource utilization enhancement through setting up downscaling clusters
- Sandboxes migration to ISO Prod. infrastructure for fast features testing in the non-production environment
- Monitoring process enrichment with Grafana to track infrastructure and system health
Gallery
Testimonials
The team’s flexibility and willingness to get things done are unique, distinguishing them from other providers. Moreover, they have a great sense of ownership.
The synergy which we've built during our collaboration with the Client’s team is based on the people-centric approach. Ankorstore has great inspiring talents which are an absolute pleasure to work with. And our dedicated specialists were never treated as contractors. We became an integral part of their engineering team that creates exciting things, cultivates both soft & hard skills improvement, nurtures openness, and supports each teammate.
Let us discuss how our team can contribute to your success