Footshop
E-commerce Platform, 2018
We all need inspiring projects, enthusiastic people and challenging opportunities to keep us motivated when tough times come or when our energy level is low. We all need things to believe in, to be keen on, to care of. This is an article where we want to share the story how we have found all of those things in one project. This is also the article about working with a market leader, lost-and-found in translation experience and the benefits of Chernivtsi visits.
How it began?
We met Peter Topor, the COO of Footshop, in early 2018. Footshop is a leader in the Czech and Slovak market. The company is passionate about sneakers and urban lifestyle and is developing so fast that every three months it is growing twice its size.
Due to its dynamic growth, Footshop was looking for an experienced IT team that would be able to join the existing project and support the rapid scaling of the e-commerce website. At that time, the website attendance reached about two million users a month. They already had physical stores in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania and planned to open a store in Ukraine one day.
We started with a small dedicated team that consisted of one front-end developer and two back-end developers. We realized from the very beginning how ambitious this project was. Such projects are always inspiring.
Three months later, the Footshop team came to Chernivtsi, Ukraine. Their staying there for one week gave us a perfect opportunity to get to know each other better and discuss the project in detail. This meeting made us understand that future work promised a great time with this aspiring team.
As for now, the project team consists of seven dedicated developers.
Functionality
Description
Footshop is one of the largest online sneakers retailers. World-famous brands such as Nike, Vans, Adidas produce limited and special edition models of footwear and Footshop sells them. For some models, auctions are held, because there are often a lot more people who want to buy these sneakers than produced pairs of shoes.
Technologies
Behind the project
In order to make the website work faster, ElasticSearch is used, which synchronizes with the MySQL database every now and then.The main concept of the architecture lies in the division into microservices. It is easier to scale them in the future. All services are isolated in Docker containers.
Technical issues
On the road
It was difficult to get started working on the project as all the manuals were in the Czech language. We were the first overseas IT partner of the company. But together with the Czech team, we quickly launched the project and designed the English language manual. The main challenge of the project is its rapid growth. This makes us think very thoroughly of each and every step in order to predict possible scaling and other problems. Another problem is the use of the old code on PrestaShop and the gradual migration to Symfony 4. All new features need to be done considering the old version and the fact that it will not exist later. Footshop is a project for which it is worth working in IT. They have an awesome young team, challenging tasks, ambitious goals and superb experience. One of the main values that we have in SapientPro is the following: if our client is successful we are successful as well. This applies perfectly to Footshop.
