About:
Seamless Source is an automated sourcing platform that helps their clients connect with reliable, ethical and sustainable manufacturers. They provide a range of services to allow you to easily manage your ordering process in one place.
SpaceIT Labs initially assisted Seamless Source in their rebranding process, starting with their logo and ending with their new website. The main objective was to ensure they had a platform that could communicate each of their values and perks to their customers, future employees and competitors. However, all of that soon changed once Seamless Source started to expand as key issues were quickly identified and the need for a new technology to meet their increasing demands was met.
The challenges Seamless Source faced…
The current problems that were identified by Seamless Source in the fashion industry were its severe lack of transparency in the supply chain, unethical and unsustainable practises with irreversible environmental damage caused by the disturbing rise of fast fashion, as well as poor communication and expensive tracking tools. Seamless Source’s goal are to make the life of their customers easier by addressing the key difficulties they faced:
- Finding sustainable manufacturers for small quantities.
- Long and difficult management processes.
- High costs for small businesses.
In order to tackle these pressing issues Seamless Source required a fresh, modern platform to connect businesses to a sustainable supplier, enable suppliers to respond with offers and allow users to manage and track their orders by logging into their online profile.
In addition to this, their previous website was too slow to and had an obsolete UI/UX design, preventing them from standing out from their competitors and attracting new clients. What they needed was a modern UI that served a practical purpose and offered a more engaging, memorable user experience that would support Seamless Source and help them to both retain their clients and complement their customer-centric approach across their entire business.
How we built a new platform:
After taking the time to understand Seamless Source’s challenges and intentions; our team took steps to research on their competitors and market, once informed we developed a clean UI that provided an excellent user experience and ensured their website showcased their values and purpose.
It was important to present their clients a clear picture of what is happening behind the scenes and to do this; we listed Seamless Source’s work process from enquiries to delivery, giving new clients the peace of mind they needed to get involved.
We also decided to include a small section with minimal wording which aims to express to clients the main selling points of why they should choose Seamless Source.
The next challenge was to design a new platform architecture that ensures flexibility, expandability and high system performance as well as the option for scalability, which we constructed with the system backend architecture using high performance solutions, optimising it for both speed and user experience.
We then created a cross platform mobile app which allows users to see their updates on the go, as well many new functionality additions to the website, such as new payment methods, timeline tools to tracks the process of client’s enquiries and even open-communication live chat features. All of these features were implemented to specialise for clients needs. We’ve also included these features on our native mobile applications so that mobile users aren’t missing out either.
The personalised activity log feature for their clients to use was a huge success as it enables them to keep track of all messages made, updates on orders, progress reports including individual enquiry related issues such as order shipment and everything in between.
The technology applied:
We developed the platform through an MVC and object-oriented approach, which separates domain/application/business logic from the rest of the user interface. Our skilled developers used VueJs to create the UI and PHP along with Laravel for its backend including developing our custom APIs. We chose to use Laravel due to Eloquent ORM and artisan console, as well as because it allows us to simplify the application architecture so that Seamless Source won’t have to worry about any code maintenance/cleanup. It comes with many pre optimised features that would benefit the platform which include features that improve performance such as an internal caching system, comprehensive validation systems, JIT compiler and of course; the option to add CDN.
All of this data is securely managed in a MySQL relational database. This type of database is considered as one of the most reliable, secure and scalable database management systems in the world. Many renowned organisations such as Amazon use it. Because protecting Seamless Source’s client’s data is extremely crucial to us, MySQL was a clear choice thanks to the amazing data protection features it offers, along with flexibility for data backup. Other additional benefits include cost-effectiveness, ease in scaling and rich community support. As Seamless Source is set to grow further, MySQL offers many scalable solutions to ensure businesses growth without any issues; all at a low cost.
Achievements!
To this date, Seamless Source has facilitated over 100 enquiries across 20 different brands in various countries such as the US, Canada, UAE, South Africa, Sweden and Denmark, with another 100 enquiries set in the pipeline. Thanks to Space IT Labs technical support they can look forward to more growth..
