Making quality home merchandise accessible to everyone through an e-commerce-to-store experience
Services Provided
Web Development, Platform Maintenance, DevOps
Project Technologies
Laravel | PHP | Vue.js | Ruby on Rails
Industry Served
E-commerce, Retail
Team Composition
2 Web Developers
Project Duration
Ongoing
The Challenge
Rent One’s e-commerce platform was constructed using a complex and obscure technology stack that few could understand. After their lead developer departed, the company found itself in a precarious situation, lacking both support and the expertise to navigate the intricacies of the source code. This left them vulnerable, as potential partners hesitated to engage with a system that seemed daunting and unmanageable.
Our Solution
At Twin Sun, we assembled a dedicated team committed to mastering and championing the latest technology. To facilitate this, we not only introduced comprehensive documentation but also established a streamlined process that empowers future developers to effectively support and enhance the platform. This initiative ensures that our knowledge is preserved and shared, fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation.
The Results
Rent One has the ability to significantly enhance its development capacity whenever necessary, thanks to the dedicated team of experts we have assembled around their advanced technology stack. This strategic investment in talent not only allows us to respond swiftly to market demands but also ensures that we remain at the forefront of innovation in our field.
Supporting Rental Payment Options In an Online Store
Rent One has over 100 brick-and-mortar stores located across the United States, with decades of experience helping people find affordable home furnishings. Giving people multiple ways to pay—retail, lease, and financing options—is a key aspect of how Rent One makes quality furniture and appliances fit within their customers' budgets.
Unfortunately, flexible payment options that worked in Rent One's physical stores were impossible to implement in existing e-commerce software. The customer journey for Rent One's e-commerce experience was also unique: they wished to initiate sales online but automatically transfer order fulfillment to each customer's closest physical store.
To overcome these challenges, Rent One's in-house developer built a custom solution on top of October CMS, a relatively obscure content management system similar to WordPress. The new e-commerce platform required over a dozen custom plugins to support everything Rent One wanted to accomplish. This new platform met Rent One's needs, giving online customers the same purchasing flexibility of the traditional in-store experience. Rent One's e-commerce business took off, becoming a big driver of purchases by first-time customers.
Custom Technology Lost Its Only Source of Support
Rent One's developer eventually moved on to other opportunities. This left the company with a complex system built on technologies few people understand. It was difficult to find anyone even willing to take on maintenance of Rent One's e-commerce platform, let alone someone experienced with October CMS and its plugin system.
Twin Sun Committed to Building Expertise In the Platform
While our team had no specific experience with October CMS, we reviewed the existing code base to see if we could help. We quickly discovered similarities in October CMS to other frameworks we were more familiar with. Our code review left us with a decent understanding of the framework and the custom plugins created by the previous developer.
We recognized that Rent One had just experienced a sudden void in capabilities due to the departure of their lone developer. To avoid the problem in the future, we formed a plan to share knowledge broadly across our team. Though the initial work we set out to do required only one full-time developer, we designated a senior developer as a project lead and assigned two additional developers to pick up some of the work under the senior developer's direction. We later trained another two developers on the project's tech stack, ensuring knowledge of the platform was widespread within our team.
Further, we put tools and processes in place to ensure future developers—even those outside of Twin Sun—could become productive quickly. We moved from an undocumented project setup to a well-documented, fully automated, Dockerized development environment. This improvement alone eliminated a solid day of setup time for each new developer joining the project. We also established a pull request process utilizing the Gitflow Workflow to manage code changes, ensuring Rent One's content manager could make text and UI changes without the assistance of a developer.
Building a Lasting Partnership
From the very start of our relationship with Rent One we worked to establish trust and gain their confidence in our abilities. We did this by demonstrating our commitment to the long-term relationship, investing in our knowledge of Rent One's technology stack. Then we quickly delivered new features despite our unfamiliarity with the existing code base by applying our knowledge of similar technologies.
Now Rent One has a development partner that fully understands their e-commerce platform. They have a future-proof solution to maintain expertise with their tech stack. Together, we have the ability to quickly implement new features and test out new ideas on their e-commerce platform.
