Author: rfvSDe3d

Hi guys,

Today, we would like to share with you one more wonderful showcase of how we’ve digitalized one of our client’s business processes. Initially, the problem was that our customer has a pretty unique warehouse plus the sales workflows which obviously, at that time, needed to be launched in an online store.

Apparently, there are two ways of doing it:

The first one is that you can develop everything from scratch. It’s definitely going to be a unique one and what you exactly need, of course, hire the right developers. The problem is that it takes a lot of time and resources.

Another way of doing that is taking something that’s been already made and customize it to your own needs.

After a particular discussion, we decided to stick to the second approach just because it saves a lot of time and money. For the online store platform, we have chosen Shopify for its stability, fast-growing process and an ability to perform a high amount of traffic. We created a private app for it, that 960 allowed us to customize the logic and filters.

Choosing the right platform for a custom warehouse and the sales processes was more complicated. After a short investigation, we’d discovered that not so many services do exist for those operations on a market. Firstly, we reviewed the Airtable, which is a pretty good service, but we understood that due to its restrictions we can’t really implement some of our custom processes to it. Eventually, we came to an assumption that Filemaker that is rebranded as Claris, fits all of our requirements.

Working with Claris, was very convenient for us and we’d developed a custom interface, implemented all custom processes to it and even created an API that had passed all needed data from Claris to Shopify and back from Shopify to Claris.

Summing everything up, I’d like to say that those work awesomely together. Our customer has successfully achieved the needed targets and has saved a lot of resources using two well-known platforms.

Hope it was useful to you all!

Please feel free sharing your own experience with us using Filemaker and Shopify.

Best regards.

I hear how bad WordPress is from a lot of people. They say how slow it is, how unprotected it is, how bad is the database for scaling, I want to say all of it is true. But after delivering hundreds of projects, after meeting dozens of experts, after working with different technologies, participating in different businesses, I want to say next: no one will create the first working version of you your website faster and cheaper using other technologies then we do use WordPress!

Explain this is pretty easy, WordPress powers 34% of the internet in 2019, If you count only the CMS-built sites, then about 60% of them are WordPress, it was launched in 2003. As a result, it has more than the rest already prepared solutions, various plugins with custom logic, integrations with other systems.

How about page speed? Well, if you follow the best World’s practices during the development process, let your developers to do everything in the right way, following pretty common speed optimizing rules, then your website will be fast enough. We did it many times and archived 90+ Google page speed scores, even on a website where it was less than 20 at the beginning.

Someone will say here: “but it is still unsafe to use WordPress all my data can be stolen!”. Damn buddy, keep up to date your WordPress version and plugins, set some good security plugin like WordFence, set CDN like CloudFlare, use complicated passwords and keep them in a safe place, don’t hire suspicious developers and your website will be protected enough. If you still think that any WordPress website can be easily hacked, tell this to White House, BBC, Bloomberg or Walt Disney guys, they use WordPress for a long time.

And finally, the WordPress bottleneck is DB scaling. I totally agree that if you are planning to have over 50 000 visitors daily on your website, you should be prepared very well. And despite powerful cloud solutions, moving complicated logic to separate parts of your website, there will be a moment where to keep the high performance of your website will be very very hard.

But tell me please, how fast you can attract such a big amount of users to your website? I saw cases when people decided to build a custom web app, spent tons of money, time and even didn’t launch! If you just launching a startup, want to try your business model or building MVP the first what you need is to launch it! Money and time are vital on this stage. Of course, when you grow big and have enough resources, you can start rebuilding your website with some more modern and faster technologies but for most cases, it is not what you need at the beginning.

Take care guys, don’t waste time and money.

C4W Spirit.