Case study: Sproutl

Main Sproutl founder Anna approached me with the idea to revolutionise the gardening industry by building a marketplace that seamlessly connects nurseries and end-client. They needed to find a simple way to prototype their business idea but it should be flexible enough to allow scaling up and test ideas without getting caught halfway and have to rebuild everything from scratch as many early-stage digital products end up doing.

I mapped their use-cases and aspirations against the current state of eCommerce platforms, payment gateway, delivery APIs, and gardening knowledge databases and proposed two 2 implementations paths:

Omnichannel API:

This design will be use a React with server side render ( SSR ) for speed and SEO and a array of web services to orquestarte the application.  Like Stripe Connect for payments or Shipengine for shipping parcels. This solution will play nicely in the long run but requires a longer development time.

eCommerce platform:
The other solution was using an  pre-built marketplace software CS-Cart. This allows them to start up in days rather than months and potentially migrate the client-side and keep using the CS-Card engine and CMS as headless API. This platform uses a stack that is aligned with Andy's knowledge - main tech leader Sproutl's.

Sproutl finally chose the latest proposal because the implementation speed was paramount to launch before the 2020 Sprint. They have been using the platform for almost a year now with great success but realised that more flexibility is needed so the time to explore the next step for the business with a headless has now come.