ITERABLE

CUSTOM SHOPIFY SOLUTIONS DEVELOPMENT FOR A CROSS-CHANNEL MARKETING PLATFORM

Client

Iterable, a modern 360° marketing platform, was looking to expand its product’s Shopify integration to allow its customers to analyze store data at even more granular levels. Over the course of a few months, we built several integrations between Shopify and the Iterable dashboard using custom APIs and webhooks, offering Shopify merchants using Iterable a new level of actionable data points to grow their business.

Challenge

As a growth marketing platform designed for cross-channel experiences, Iterable integrates with a wide range of popular applications. As their business has grown, an increasing number of popular sales and marketing channels have been integrated to meet customer needs. One channel they wanted to offer was Shopify.

After a previously unsuccessful development attempt with another large NYC agency, Iterable approached us with an urgent need to re-build their Shopify integration so it not only worked but was also more scalable and robust in order to handle their growing Shopify customer base.

Strategy

After assessing the needs of different departments within Iterable, as well as interviewing the customer base of Iterable, we outlined a series of custom Shopify solutions to their team around how the integration could work.

Our first suggestion was to use custom webhooks and non-native APIs, allowing Shopify merchants to leverage Iterable’s customer engagement capabilities at a deeper level and gain insights into a wide range of key marketing metrics they didn’t have at Shopify. The custom additions would allow Shopify merchants using Iterable to sync, track and analyze data such as on-site user behaviour across pages, post-purchase customer data, inventory, product data, and lots more, all from their Iterable dashboard.

Since Iterable’s Shopify userbase was growing rapidly, these custom solutions were also designed to process a large number of marketing events and customer data at the same time, all while remaining fast and agile on the front-end.

customized mobile app design and development

design and develop shopify store services

/ Iterable

Solutions

Managing the connections between Iterable and Shopify were mainly achieved through native integrations, as well as custom API calls and webhooks. On the front-end, the admin panel was a publicly embedded Shopify admin app based on a react app boilerplate with TypeScript support. The user interface was built using React components and navigation between pages was handled on Iterable’s side using React Router v5. Axios. Due to the complexity of marketing tracking, some of the attribution events had to be tracked across multiple user actions. This meant we had to build a pipeline to glue all of this data together in an effective fashion.

Back-end details:

- Golang (Programming language);

- MySQL (Relational database management system);

- AWS ECS (Container orchestration service);

- AWS SQS (Distributed message queuing service);

- GitLab ci (As a tool for software development using continuous methodologies)

Results

Achieving the goals Iterable came to us with, we ended up with a very scalable and easily maintainable solution to process and manage a number of complex event attributions for the Iterable platform. As required, the platform was able to process a very large amount of traffic without any loss of data or performance, which helped to unlock new levels of value for Iterable and Shopify users.

Review

“The only major limitations we faced were the Shopify API rates. To solve this, we implemented a solution based on SQS AWS for queuing the requests and for further processing which worked like a charm.“