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 need
E-com domain is highly competitive and Ankorstore planned not only to keep up with the market demands but to be on top of it. So, they sought a reliable technical partner, to scale their development team, take over product optimization, and support them along the evolutionary growth.
Result
Partnership with the Sigma Software web development team helped Ankorstore grow their development capacity and boost collaboration. Together we improved the core platform functionality to align it with business goals while saving costs on infrastructure and 3rd party integrations.
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 Ankorstore’s hiring and development speed expectations, swiftly adapting to their ways of working. Our team assisted the Client through their evolutionary growth, contributing with our business and technical expertise to ongoingly improve the product:
- Integrated a set of payment (e.g. Stripe, PayPal, SEPA) and ~20 shipping (e.g. FedEx, DHL, Royal Mail) systems
- Introduced the solution yielding 30% lower cost on 3rd party translation tool
- Developed automatic import of goods & products to reduce manual efforts
- Extended a back office functionality and enhanced product attribution & categorization for smarter product items management
- Enhanced the signup flow and the user registration form that allows to fill in extensive user information in just a few clicks
- Improved the customer claims, enabling attachments and a pre-set list of products to choose from
- Featured the built-in messaging tool with new functionality allowing to add attachments, sort by date, and initiate selective dialogs
- Upgraded UI/UX of the marketplace Home page and performed a full redesign of the brands’ landing pages, yielding 80% increase in retailers’ signup
Delivery Transformation
The platform was successful, growing to support over 30K brands & 300K retailers. Ankorstore wanted to make sure their capabilities matched the rapid product growth, so engaged our experts to conduct both delivery processes and technical audit.
We analyzed product architecture and development practices, created a transformation roadmap for improvement areas, and moved to its implementation. As the product delivery was divided across several business units, each responsible for a certain platform component, we also helped facilitate productive collaboration across them. The changes within delivery transformation included:
- Restructuring of monolith architecture through separated front-end and back-end to optimize the development process towards more flexibility
- Migrating the Home page and preparing the infrastructure of additional pages for moving to Nuxt 3 and server-side rendering of Vue 3 components to optimize performance, improve search visibility, and enhance user experience
- Enabling migration to Progressive Web Apps, so Ankorstore could provide their mobile users with an app-like experience on the web
- Improving CI/CD pipelines to streamline new features deployment
- Isolating the E2E testing module to improve E2E testing pipelines, simplify test creation, and enable testing of both monolith and smaller projects across the system
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