Swag.com is a New York-based eCommerce startup launched in 2016 that provides custom-designed promotional products for brands: stationery, glassware, devices, accessories, clothing, and others.
The first client of Swag.com was Facebook. An order worth a little over $1000 pushed the brand forward with a “blue-chip company” name. In a two-year period, Swag.com has become a B2B company with over $4 million in sales. Now, the company is working with thousands of world-famous brands including Facebook, Google, WeWork, Amazon, Harry’s, Starbucks, Netflix, and many others.
Swag.com is essentially an online salesperson offering a wide selection of products, and processing millions of orders at any moment. What puts them at the top of the market is a multi-functional and, at the same time, easy-to-use web application developed by Ezetech and, of course, the high quality of their products, and fast delivery. An automated streamlined order system moves away from the old school process of ordering by phone and makes it easier to create customized mockups.
To make Swag.com a perfect selling machine and bring their ambitious ideas to life, our experts have added multiple complex functions such as a logo color detection, multiple logo placements, custom price calculation based on the number of colors on the logo, associated products suggestion, discount system, and many others.
This e-commerce case study website showcases the challenges we faced and the solutions we offered.
E-commerce
2 years
Company co-founders, Jeremy Parker and Joshua Orbach, had an offline business and a strong ambition to bring it online to join a $40 billion market. After buying the domain, Swag.com, they decided to build an eCommerce platform to sell quality custom promotional products.
Swag.com did not need just MVP development, but a strong back-end that would work with price customization. They had worked with another software development company before and came to us to develop the final 10% of their product. At least, they thought so.
But the Shopify platform chosen for the implementation of the idea didn't allow the level of product customization that would make Swag.com that special. After conducting some market studies, we decided to create a new custom eCommerce website from scratch.
From the technical point of view, the biggest challenge of the web development was to create a system that would calculate prices according to the type of the product, the number of logos on the product and the number of logo colors.
Our solution was to use one of the libraries that help the system to detect colors on the downloaded logo. We also developed an algorithm that breaks logos down into pixels, groups them by color order and decides which color should be printed and where it should be applied.
The products they receive as a result would have the logo colors in accordance to the logos they had uploaded beforehand.
The eCommerce web development requirements of this project assumed not only a super transparent checkout UX but also very strong operations support on the backend of the site to allow the Swag.com team to deliver orders in a highly customized way.
We have developed a checkout solution that would allow customers to configure the production time and shipping, and to be able to complete the purchase fast and easily.
On the backend part of the site, we have developed an absolutely customized order processing workflow that allows the transitioning of orders between different stages, track all of the related information from a single place, and easily lead the order to its full completion.
The Swag.com case study website itself is what differentiates them from competitors. To start with, the design of the website appeals to today’s buyers, has a well-thought-out UX and is mobile friendly.
A fully automated ordering system processes millions of orders at any moment and lets users create their own mock-ups and customized products in a matter of minutes. The product selection process is made easier thanks to carefully crafted collections of top products in user-friendly developed categories.
Moreover, the company keeps evolving and adjusting to customer demands by improving and adding new features.
Technology Stack
Back-end: Node.js
Front-end: React.js
HTML
Team: We started working on the Swag.com eCommerce website development with a team of two developers, and now, there are five developers, two QA's and one PM working on the project as a dedicated team.
Duration: Ongoing from July 2016
This eCommerce case study was a project with more questions left unanswered than answered. We shifted the direction of the web development process and brought this project to the next level. Currently, we define it as a fully customized platform for fully customized swag, with every single feature built for users, and for the Swag.com team, who works hard to deliver top quality products to their clients.
In the near future, we plan to roll out multiple UX improvements to offer users an even more seamless experience throughout the eCommerce pathway. In our backlog, we have new exciting pages to develop that will allow filtering products by brands and topics. Our team is also working on operations by actively extending functionality for order and submissions processing, better sales and customer service.
Our biggest project running right now is the enterprise custom store platform, which will allow large companies to obtain bulk promotional merchandise orders from Swag.com, and have their own eCommerce store with a management backend panel and public pages, which would allow the selling of swag to their employees in multiple offices around the world.
