Shopthat

With SHOPTHAT, influencers would be able to choose products provided by cosmetics retailers and tag them in their Instagram posts or YouTube videos. For end-users shopping would be quick and easy, as a chatbot would guide them through the buying process.

It helps uncover risks, generate ideas and find the best solutions for the project. Since we were working on a quick prototype here, we’ve conducted the first kick-off session remotely. A call with SHOPTHAT enabled us to prioritize features, establish the communication process and suggest the tech for the prototype.

Once we’ve successfully delivered a prototype, we could follow up with an MVP. This time, we welcomed SHOPTHAT at our office to conduct design thinking workshops and further discuss how the project should be developed. Meeting the client at our office gave us an even better understanding of the project’s requirements and business objectives.

To kickstart the development of the project, we used our own React boilerplate. On top of that we used Elasticsearch engine for browsing the products and D3. js library for quicker data rendering.

The FLIP technique helped us to speed up animations. Delivering the Messenger bot, the challenge was to integrate it with Instagram and YouTube APIs, as well as Shopify and Stripe for payments. As we needed to create custom user flows for people coming from different social networks, we used oAuth authorization and an open source library Python Social Auth to create an authentication workflow.

As there are still limited resources regarding commerce conversational platforms, we created our own implementation of handlers to manage different queries the bot had to answer.