Unlocking e-commerce potential: a case study on Barkyn's API-driven data synchronization
Challenges
Migrate services to a new robust easy-to-change, and scalable implementation.
Services
Backend Development.
Outcomes
Development of APIs and services that facilitated the integration of e-commerce with external systems.
Barkyn is innovating in dog food and care in Portugal
Barkyn is a Portuguese dog food and service subscription company, founded in 2017. By investing in technology and innovation, and using AI to personalize customer support, Barkyn has been delivering a business model centered on animal welfare and at the owners' convenience, developing personalized plans and foods for dogs on an individual basis.
They approached Untile in 2023 to support her customized services, integrating all her online shopping services, and implementing something more robust, that would match her current business situation and better serve her customers.
Barkyn was looking to improve its efficiency through more robust integration between its systems
Currently, Barkyn's online store is hosted on the Shopify platform. However, there are other personalized services in operation to facilitate integration with different systems.
By recognizing the importance of integrations, and seeking to improve the implementation of these services to ensure a more efficient and integrated operation, Barkyn arrived with a very clear challenge for our team.
Their goal was to merge all their online retail offerings and establish a more resilient system that aligned with their present business requirements, enhancing customer satisfaction in the process.
Our team's initial approach on understanding Barkyn's challenge
We needed to resolve the lack of information sharing and skills in software development, which depended on a few people, and make the necessary modifications to meet new requests and problems simply, making it more reliable.
To do this, it was necessary to understand and document the current system used by Barkyn in a way that our team had in-depth knowledge of the system. This way, it would be possible to put our main objective into practice: migrating Barkyn's services to a new implementation, which is more robust, easy to use, and scalable for their business.
Solutions in focus: developing a comprehensive integration for Barkyn
Workshops with Barkyn’s team
With the objectives well defined, and solutions for technical challenges encountered, today it was time to take action with the client. With that, our team performed a series of workshops with the Barkyn’s team.
The workshops were important to fully understand all the services that would be involved in this integration and their architecture, as well as helping to understand how the development of these services was being carried out by the Barkyn team.
With the workshops, in addition to having an even clearer view of the core software used by Barkyn, like Shopify, there were still several important integrations to be redesigned, like integration with Recharge subscription software to a printing documents service.
Best practices within engineering
We realized that we were able to act on two distinct fronts with Barkyn, the first of which was implementing best engineering practices within the integration services.
In this sense, some of the practices adopted within this process were good automation of test coverages in critical parts of the service, introduction of code review and improving its quality, establishing of code standards and guidelines, promoting more consistency and readability, in addition to highlighting the importance of all documentation, including architectural design, coding conventions, and API documentation, making maintenance even more accessible.
An integration layer through a software architecture
It is normal in a startup environment for software to grow to a point where it becomes unmanageable. Therefore, we needed to focus on the foundation as well.
To do this, we would handle integrations between the Shopify backend and external systems - such as order shipping, billing, and subscriptions - thus creating an integration layer. Furthermore, we would continue with integration authentication, creating an API layer.
Turning challenges into solutions: Untile’s integration of Barkyn
An integrated solution for Barkyn's e-commerce
After integrating the layers, mainly with the backend and Shopify systems, thus improving the performance, reliability, and scalability of Barkyn's services, thus providing rapid development of the solution, our team managed to deliver the desired integration.
The team managed to develop a set of APIs and services that allow the synchronization of all Barkyn e-commerce data and support the various automated workflows with external systems such as billing software, shipping platforms, payment platforms, and printing, among others.
The basis of integration for Barkyn to go further
Our team at Untile managed, together with the client, to develop the necessary integrations to deliver autonomy to the client. In this sense, we set up a production test environment so that the client could have a solid base, where all their services are centralized and stabilized, and the Barkyn team could continue with the growth of the business.
Thus, Untile was able to deliver an integration for Barkyn that will facilitate and support the business to go much further, always efficiently and at a high level.
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