Let’s Buy
E-commerce Solution for Saudi Arabia
Introduction
Let’s Buy is an e-commerce mobile application and website dedicated to women’s fashion merchandise across Saudi Arabia at a very competitive price. The app has very subtle designs which makes it engaging along with it, unique user experience makes it more user-friendly.
iOS Technology Stack
App Framework
React Native
A framework for building cross-platform native apps with React
Social Login
Facebook & Google SDK
User can choose from different types of social media login like Facebook and Google login
Push Notifications
Firebase
Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) is a cross-platform messaging solution that sends notification messages to drive user re-engagement and retention.
Crash Reporting
Firebase Crashlytics
Firebase Crashlytics is a lightweight, realtime crash reporter that helps you track, prioritize, and fix stability issues that erode your app quality.
Help & Support Chat
Zendesk
Zendesk is a suite of support apps that helps transform your customer service into agents for customer retention and lead source. ... Zendesk Support puts all customer interactions in one dynamic interface for an efficient, seamless process.
Maps
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping service developed by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° panoramic views of streets, real-time traffic conditions, and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bicycle, and air, or public transportation.
Places & Navigation
Google Places API
The Places API is a service that returns information about places using HTTP requests. Places are defined within this API as establishments, geographic locations, or prominent points of interest.
Backend and Web App Technology Stack
Front-End
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser.
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language like HTML.
jQuery
jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML DOM tree traversal and manipulation, as well as event handling, CSS animation, and Ajax. It is free, open-source software using the permissive MIT License.
Server
Digital Ocean
DigitalOcean provides developers cloud services that help to deploy and scale applications that run simultaneously on multiple computers.
Back-End
Opencart Shopping Framework
Opencart is an online store management system built using PHP programming language and MySql database. It is a framework and system with many basic shopping store functionalities already integrated.
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose programming language originally designed for web development.
Database
MySQL
MySQL is an Oracle-backed open source relational database management system (RDBMS) based on Structured Query Language (SQL). MySQL runs on virtually all platforms, including Linux, UNIX and Windows.
App Features
01.
Social Login
Users can skip the manual log-in process by logging-in with their Facebook or Gmail accounts which definitely saves time and makes it effortless.
02.
Payment Options
Shoppers can use their favorite payment option as Let’s Buy supports Card payments, Direct Bank Transfer, Cash on Delivery which makes the payment process smooth.
03.
Autocomplete Address
Users will have to no longer manually type lengthy addresses as Let’s Buy has Google Places Autocomplete Address API integration which makes it error free and effortless.
04.
Search
Search made easy, search the products that you are looking for by its brand name or model.
05.
Ratings & Reviews
Users can star-rate, write a review and even upload a photo of the product they ordered as customer satisfaction.
06.
Product Link Sharing
Users can share the product details with their friends or family directly on other social media applications in just one click.
07.
In-App Notifications
Users will get in-app notifications for order delivery status and promotional messages when there’s a sale/discount on any product.
08.
Tracking
Users can track the real-time status of their order by entering the tracking id in Vaal.me or Armex, which will be automatically generated after placing the order successfully.
09.
Cancel or Return
There is an option to either cancel the order or return the product back.
10.
Localization Support
Let’s Buy supports both English and Arabic languages.
11.
Multiple Currency support
No matter from which country of the world the user wants to buy a product from Let’s Buy, there is no need to pay extra charges for currency conversion as multiple currency support here makes it very.
12.
Coupon & Gift cards
Users can avail exciting discounts by applying coupons while purchasing items from Let’s Buy and users can also gift a gift-card to their friends or family.
13.
Customer Service
Customer service is the role dedicated to helping customers get the value they paid for from a product or service and so here users can get immediate answers to their questions
Challenges
There are many products that are available in multiple colors and hence users can select a particular color from the given options to view the product in that color so integrating it in Let’s Buy was the main challenge for us. With the multiple third party integrations the real time tracking of the parcel with the multiple companies and showing in the system was a challenge.
App’s main aim was to provide the best customer services to customers by integrating Zendesk however the challenge was Zendesk does not provide SDKs for React-native framework applications so we had to make a custom framework for the same.
Client wanted the app and websites to be from RTL when the language was changed from English and Arabic.
Solution
To overcome the product color problem we created a color based images plugin in OpenCart for Let’s Buy which helps admin to add images of products with respect to the colors.
We created our own React-native framework module for Zendesk which helps us to provide better customer service to our customers.
In order to achieve the RTL we had to give different design and text support for the Arabic language for website and apps so when the language is changed the pages change accordingly.
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