PopShop

Inspiration

Since the start of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has made life extremely difficult for high streets everywhere. With many of us working from home over the last 18 months, local communities are thriving and people want to buy local and back local businesses.

We have also seen a rise in new independent retail businesses popping up all over the place as people have had more time to work on their personal ventures. However, with the world opening back up, it can be difficult to get off the ground without a physical premises and get products in front of customers.

What it does

PopShop allows all retailers to come together, share spaces and boost their outreach. We match larger vendors with smaller merchants to rent out portions of their retail space from shelves to whole displays. Larger vendors can provide local “mom-and-pop” shops extra exposure for their products or services, whilst also adding points of interest to increase footfall in their own stores or utilise available space.

How we built it

We combined a variety of platforms together. The main backend engine is built with google firebase utilising google cloud functions and firestore database. The function contains a small express application turning the individual function into a microservice. Here we orchestrate our commerce platform (commercetools) and our CMS (Contenful).

Commercetools gives us the ability to manage the rental spaces as a product opening up further integration options. Our static content; like images, are hosted in Contentful. Our function combines the information from these services and sends them to the application to be displayed.

We have two applications built using create-react-app and their deployment and hosting is managed through layer0. To test everything works as it should and no breaking changes are introduced we use TestEvolve to run end to end tests against the applications and the API exposed by our cloud function.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating multiple services always has its challenges but with the ability present in our team we were able to build simple solutions.

Finding collaboration time was another challenge as everyone has busy schedules. We decided to allow some freedom at the start to work when we could and after we had built some functionality we shifted to a dedicated virtual office where anyone could drop by, see who was around and collaborate on their tasks. We used a kanban board to keep track of our tasks and had a scrum like meeting every other day to keep a check on our progress.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With PopShop, hosts and retailers have their own apps to manage their needs. PopShop does the rest to make selling products a reality! We really believe that this project can help out in our local high streets and bring a positive change to the concept of in-store shopping.

What we learned

We all learned how easy it is to make our ideas a reality. The free tiers offered for so many products give you a considerable amount of working room. They are also multiple tools now which take the difficulty of hosting and deploying away from the developer. All this has encouraged us to pursue our own ideas and projects.

We truly understood team-ownership on this project. Everybody was passionate about what they built, they had ideas to contribute and wanted to make it the best.

What's next for PopShop

A whole host of features and additions are possible! We want to refine our user experience, provide more filter options, further develop user registration, expand the application process for spaces and overall, make PopShop the first step in improving outreach for small retailers.

Built With

• commercetools
• contentful
• create-react-app
• firebase
• javascript
• layer0
• testevolve
• typescript