InkSoft Online Stores
Background
Online Stores was one of the biggest undertakings and most challenging projects InkSoft has ever done to date. We had about 15 different eCommerce Web Store themes, all built in .NET. Maintaining, updating, and fixing bugs on these themes was getting costly and time-consuming. Our goal was to build an all new Online store application, but just one that was customizable. It would be customizable in a way that we didn’t need a bunch of themes to provide our customers with variety. Customers could change the fonts, font size, headings, colors, buttons, and a variety of other UI elements to their site. They could add “components” to their site as well. Components included were testimonials, image carousels, featured products, fundraisers, calls to action, promo bars, and request a quote.. This app would include new technology and features none of us had ever programmed before. We were excited for the challenge and the lessons to be learned along the way. This was going to be the biggest update since InkSoft was started. We wanted to blow our customer’s minds (in a good way of course).
Process and Solution
We chose Angular 2 as the front end framework for this new application. We had started building another application in Angular 2 and really started to love the component architecture and Typescript. Having interfaces in a massive application with tons of different Objects saves so much time and helps prevents bugs later on down the road. By using Angular’s built in FactoryResolver, we were able to dynamically create component instances based off of the definitions we had wrote for each Component. The new Online Store ecosystem we created for our customers was almost like a smaller version of Wix or one of those other website GUI builders. It’s extremely powerful and allows our customers to create highly customizable websites tailored to their brand and company.
These components were also great continuous marketing mojo for our Stakeholders. We are constantly adding Components to the library based on customer requests. We received tons of positive feedback and our customers love the new platform. On average in 2018, over $400,000.00 thousands dollars a day in transactions gets processed in the Online Stores platform. Our software and Stores platforms allow InkSoft’s customers to be more successful and sell more merch.