Orderstep

Challenge

Orderstep is a fast-growing startup with a small in-house team. Since it was initially self-funded, the company needed to use their limited resources wisely. At the same time, implementing new features fast can be fundamental to a startup’s success. To remain on schedule and reduce pressure on the internal team, Orderstep turned to Redwerk.

They wanted to extend the Orderstep customer portal with personal webshops so that their customers could not only improve quote management and customer flow at every touchpoint but also sell their products on the same platform.

Orderstep asked the Redwerk team to develop the frontend part of the webshop functionality. Here are some of the requirements we were expected to meet:

• Framework-free solution. The webshop backend was already completed, so using a framework would require tweaking it to a great extent to make it compatible with the frontend. That’s why we were asked to build the UI without relying on any frameworks.
• Flexibility.Redwerk is known for its flexibility in terms of communication and tools our customers prefer using. This time we needed to ensure our client could directly communicate with our developers as he is a software engineer himself.
• Documentation. We were also expected to analyze requirements specifications, identify gaps, and address those issues either by engaging the Orderstep team or drawing on our long-standing e-commerce expertise to handle them independently.

Lastly, we had to deliver the final solution in line with the project estimate we prepared for Orderstep earlier.

Solution

Single-page applications (SPA) have proven their effectiveness in making user experiences seamless. Instead of loading entire new pages upon interacting with the user, a SPA loads only a single web document. It dynamically rewrites the current web page, fetching only those pieces of data that the user needs.

React is a go-to framework for building a SPA. While we couldn’t use frameworks because of the backend peculiarities, we still wanted the webshop to have some of the SPA benefits. That’s why we offered to use React for interactive parts of the online store, whereas static pages were frameworkless.

As for the second requirement, our developers have high English proficiency, which made direct communication between Redwerk and Orderstep developers barrier-free.

The Figma designs we received didn’t detail all the element states, so before proceeding with implementing those, we would engage the Orderstep decision-makers and offer them options considered the latest industry standard.

The UI we developed includes a product gallery, detailed product page, fields for customizing the item’s color, number and other characteristics before adding the product to the cart, the shopping cart itself, and checkout.