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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Who worked on this project?
What tools, techniques and methodologies were used on this project?
Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams
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AWS CodeCommit is a fully-managed source control service that hosts secure Git-based repositories.
A Region is a geographical area, which consists of two or more Availability Zones, which are synonymous for a Data Center.
Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications
Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol.
Ruby is a dynamic, interpreted, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity.
Rails is a web application development framework written in the Ruby programming language
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