BrightSign and Shopify Integration

4/2/2014 to 6/26/2019: We integrated BrightSign with Shopify to automate onsite marketing for Country Shore

Client

Country Shore

Industries: Social Media, Marketing, Retail, Apparel

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Architectural Diagrams

Check out architectural diagrams of this project

Problem

What was the problem to be solved?

Country Shore is a lifestyle brand that primarily sells clothing direct to consumer via its E-commerce platform or on location via its POS platform.

Country Shore uses Shopify for both, and "on location" could mean anywhere as Country Shore's "store" is a 20-by-10-by-12 high-tech trailer, complete with two flatscreens with DirecTV, air conditioning, video games and of course, a full store.

But one thing it was lacking was a way to highlight the way the products, especially dresses, looked while on a human.

And while they had changing tents, there was no easy way to see it on a person before trying it on.

Solution

What was the proposed solution?

Gunner Technology proposed installing a third flatscreen which would be connected to a BrightSign which would connect to a feed which would pull product photos (on models) from Shopify and display them on the flatscreen so customers could see the products on models.

Challenges

What challenges arose during the project?

The only challenge we had wasn't much of a challenge, but we had never used BrightSign's BrightAuthor to create applications, so we had to learn how to use that API.

Technical

What was the technical approach to the project?

Once we built the client app in BrightAuthor, the REST was a snap.

We build a single microservice in Node running on AWS Lambda that connected to Country Shore's Shopify platform using the Shopify API and pulled down (in realtime) the latest product photos for the products in the trailer.

The BrightSign app would then poll AWS API Gateway for the data and display it on the flatscreen.

Management

What was the project management approach to the project?

We took an Agile Scrum approach to the project with one-week iterations and an IPM each week to demonstrate our progress.

We started with one Research Sprint to learn about BrightAuthor, and after that, we worked in development sprints until completion.

Lessons

What did you learn from working on this project?

We learned how to use the BrightAuthor SDK to pull data from remote sources - in this case Shopify, which we used to generate an RSS feed that was consumed by the BrightSign.

Benefits

How did this project benefit the client?

Country Shore actually saw a 4% increase in onsite sales after we created this integration and it's 100% automated.

Why Gunner?

Why was Gunner selected for this project?

Gunner Technology has had a long-standing relationship with Country Shore as we helped set up their entire technology infrastructure when the company launched and are constantly automating redundant tasks for them.