Seen Merch Case Study

Discovery

Seen Merch came to us with a need to simplify their accounting process. Previously, they had to manually tabulate orders, vendors and shipping across their multiple Shopify shops into a spreadsheet every month to calculate vendor payouts. This created a huge burden on the finance team, as well as a limiting bottleneck for future growth.

Seen Merch’s proposal was simple: create a portal that automatically syncs all vendors and orders from their multiple shops into one easy to use website, and automatically calculate payouts on a monthly basis, eliminating the need for lengthy data copying. We created user stories and basic UX maps prior to project launch, and reviewed the project scope with the client to ensure that their needs and workflows were taken into account.

Buildout

Through the discovery, we planned the buildout and outlined every feature that needed to be deployed, ensuring that new functionality would maintain and compliment existing workflows. We organized all work according to user stories, ensuring that all functionality was covered in development.

Due to its flexibility as well as the scalability needs of the project, we chose the Laravel platform to build out the portal. Our first step in development was creating the boilerplate infrastructure of the portal, allowing us to quickly showcase progress. The next step our developers took was to create the data models for the api to sync to, including but not limited to vendors, payout, products, orders and order line items.
We then began to develop the api sync jobs for the portal. We worked extensively with the api documentation to ensure that all data was being properly imported and categorized. Since this represented the core functionality of the app, our developers spent a considerable amount of time testing these integrations.

Throughout the buildout process, our project managers QA’d features and functionality on the website as they were created and pushed to our development server. We regularly handed off sections of the site to the client for QA, ensuring that everyone had tested and signed off on the changes prior to launch.

Launch

The new Seen Merch Vendor app delivers a fully functional experience geared towards admins and vendors. Vendors are able to see thier synced products and payout reports. Administrators are able to fully manage vendors, products and payouts across their multiple platforms. Seen Merch’s new vendor portal elevates their brand and alleviates bottlenecks limiting growth, positioning them as a unique and important player in merch and fulfillment communities across the world.