AZ Factory

This case was interesting because the client had already worked with two development teams before coming to us. There were only two months left until the official launch of the store — a significant part of the project had already been completed, but even more work had to be done in the shortest time possible.

We are experienced in taking projects from other development teams and know how to continue the work without any delays and with better time and quality performance. Our technical skills were the perfect fit for the project, and the in-house resources were large enough to provide an extensive team. So, we took on the challenge.

Our cooperation started with a trial period — we understand how tough and risky it is to choose a contractor and want to make this process as easy as possible by offering this option.

During this time, our development team is assigned some small tasks, so the client can safely test working with us and check the quality of our work and communication processes. Initially, the trial period with AZ Factory was planned to be two weeks, but after the first week, the client was happy with everything we did and decided to go long-term.

The overall work on the project could be divided into several main categories:

• Development of the new functionality and customization of the Shopify theme
• Fixing the work of the previous contractors (code review and website refactoring)
• Integration with third-party services and tracking systems like Google Tag Manager, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn tracking, etc.
• Single sign-on functionality implementation
• Additional cybersecurity enhancements for the custom store functionality

In this case, we’ll cover just some of the work that was done for the AZ Factory store, highlighting only the most significant parts.

The pre-order functionality is extremely important for any fashion-related business — this way, a company knows the demand for the upcoming collections and can effectively plan business processes.

All out-of-the-box Shopify solutions were not suitable in this case because of the specifics of the business and the company size, so the client used our former in-house pre-order app. We also built a new custom app to cover the missing functionality to fit the business processes perfectly. Currently, our team is also working on another custom app that would track the statistics on orders, export these extended statistics from the store, and send them to the ERP system used within the company.

Instead of the standard Shopify checkout, we integrated the Global-E checkout into the AZ Factory store. The brand sells worldwide, and this checkout is used to display prices in local currencies, set fixed prices for different countries, and eliminate other possible complications involved in cross-border selling. All these processes happen within one store and are very flexible to manage.

A lot of work was done on the correct display of prices for different countries and on the recalculation of these prices according to the Global-E currency rates. In addition, various third-party plugins that display product prices are not connected with Global-E by default, so we needed to enable the correct price recalculation everywhere within the store. Also, one of our tasks was to ensure the correct work of all tracking systems that collect data about the exact price and the currency in which purchases are made.

AZ Factory products can be purchased both in their Shopify store and on SharpEnd, the company's partner platform. The idea is that if a customer already has an account on one of the platforms, they could use the same credentials to log in on the other — this way, the customer engagement would be significantly increased. Our task was to implement that single sign-on functionality and to ensure its correct work.

To connect two completely independent platforms, we used the Auth0 authentication service. Our development team configured the Auth0 server to store the AZ Factory user data and update it according to changes in the Shopify store. The SharpEnd developers used this data on their side, allowing us to create a common database of passwords and logins and integrate the single sign-on feature.

Being a high-end fashion brand, it was extremely important for AZ Factory to allow its customers to see products as they are in real life.

To enable this, we integrated into the AZ Factory store a third-party 3D player, stylized it to fit the store's design, and set everything up to work correctly. Now the client has a seamlessly working and easy-to-manage functionality to upload and display the required 3D models in addition to the common image gallery.

Shopify protects its merchants by default, but when there's a lot of custom development involved, it can be potentially vulnerable for not being a part of the Shopify ecosystem. So, AZ Factory went for additional cybersecurity measures, and our task was to enhance the store's protection from attacks, hacks, and spam.

For example, one of the customer support forms in the AZ Factory store allows customers to upload videos and images, and we developed certain restrictions to eliminate the possibility of uploading malicious files. It's just one small case that can be mentioned openly, but the security measures were taken to protect the store on all levels.

To manage an online store of this level, there is always a need for all kinds of reports to check up on the correct work of all website elements. If something breaks on the frontend part, the problem is found immediately, but it can be tough to detect if the backend functionality goes wrong. For this, the Sentry service was integrated.

We receive regular reports on the website's functioning and have a history of all log tracking in the backend. So, even if something happened in the past, we have access to all this data in real-time and can quickly find the problem and fix it, saving our client work hours.

This task wasn’t initially on the scope, but we suggested this solution to the client to prevent possible mistakes and make store management reliable and secure.