Introduction
La Tienda is a company specializing in authentic Spanish food and products www.tienda.com. They offer a wide variety of delicacies, including cured meats like jamón ibérico and chorizo, olive oil, and traditional sweets like turrón.
They operate as a direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce business, sourcing Spanish products to sell directly to customers through their online store. This model eliminates the need for intermediaries, allowing them to offer competitive pricing, multi-recipient gifting, customized shipping and better control over the customer experience.
La Tienda markets to individuals who appreciate Spanish cuisine and are interested in purchasing high-quality, authentic ingredients sourced directly from Spain to prepare meals at home or at their restaurant. This includes cooks, chefs, or anyone with a passion for Spanish food culture. Customers in North America with Spanish heritage looking for familiar flavors from their homeland are also frequent shoppers.
La Tienda had a legacy custom e-commerce platform built over 15 years that while usable, was showing its age. Being a monolithic non-scalable application it was not able to take advantage of modern technologies both at the client level, and at the back end and infrastructure level.
Idextrus is a leading authority in building, hosting and maintaining e-business applications with over 20 years in the business. We have our roots in the pre-Application Service Provider era of the late ‘90s and span the years since, building everything from Tax Refund systems for the government to wholesale B2B applications, e-commerce applications for specialty food, consumer packaged goods, cloud migrations and much more. We also have partnerships with AWS (Cloud), Halo Security, Attentive and others and are at the forefront of modern, secure and scalable application development methodologies and scalable cloud services.
Challenges and Objectives
La Tienda was facing specific challenges in an ever-competitive marketplace. Since their website and back end CMS system was built over several years as a monolithic application, improvements to security, scalability and performance were critically hampered without a new approach. They knew that they were operating on borrowed time and needed to make thoughtful decisions on their next steps. They looked at various “out of the box” solutions such as Shopify and Big Commerce, but after detailed analysis, found they these solutions would only get them part of the way to where they needed to be; both for their customers and for their staff.
Challenges included, but were not limited to:
- Issues with security
- Almost non-existent scalability
- Speed of site a concern without powerful back-end servers
- Single point of failure
Given the challenges, the objectives were easy to set. La Tienda knew that in addition to solving their specific challenges, they would also be able to achieve additional wins such as:
- Improved customer experience
- Increase in conversion rates
- Increase in average order value (AOV) while reducing time spent on the site
- Drastically improve the ability for the Customer Care team to be successful via dedicated back end tools
- Decoupled code bases would mean no single point of failure
- Robust security
- Limitless scalability
The Idextrus Solution
The Idextrus team started by performing a detailed analysis and audit of the legacy Tienda application. This included a deep dive into the client side code base, the admin backend CMS and the database schema. We then provided the team at La Tienda with a development proposal based on the Agile methodology. Once approved by La Tienda, this allowed the Idextrus team to dig right in and start to define Epics to which we wrote the user stories for all of the disparate and connected components.
The database was completely reimagined and redesigned to have tighter relations between tables which would make queries much quicker and easier to write. Excess cruft was removed - a major downside of the legacy application where some data was redundantly stored. In the La Tienda legacy application, this had always posed a major issue with data manipulation and management. The result is a database that is quick and cheaper to host while providing redundancy, reliability and scalability.
Out of the gate, the architecture was designed as a multi-tenant application that could be extended to be a SaaS application. This was a critical consideration as Tienda had other tenants already running on their legacy application.
The Idextrus team built the new platform on three separate but connected code bases:
- The back-end application, powered by Laravel, MySQL and Redis cache.
- The admin front-end built in React, Material UI and Typescript
- The customer front-end built with React, NextJS and Tailwind
The back-end is fully headless commerce, meaning that it is “API-first” and fully decoupled from any of the front-end systems. One of the many benefits here is that not only can specific APIs be exposed to ANY external application that may want to connect, but changes to business logic can happen without any affect on front-end systems or interfaces.
Idextrus stood up and managed all infrastructure for the new platform on AWS cloud adhering to the well architected framework. Since we were adopting a “shift-left” methodology with respect to security, it made sense to build out the infrastructure while building the application. This is known as a DevSecOps approach and it is one in which we firmly advocate.
We also employed test-driven development (TDD) to ensure that features were not released without test coverage ensuring that bugs were found before sending them to the La Tienda testing team.
Key Features
The list of features developed in this solution are too numerous to mention in a case study, so we will list some highlights:
- Security first on all aspects of the application
- Multi-recipient gifting
- Dynamic cart per recipient
- Near time inventory
- Highly customizable shipping system tying directly to the warehouse
- Headless Commerce
- Completely separate staging and production environments
- WCAG 2.0 accessible
- Multiple payment options
- Multi-tenancy
- Digital, subscriptions and regular goods flow through checkout concurrently
- And more
Innovations
Idextrus reimagined a method by which a shopper could add items to their cart and then add up to 20 recipients, each with a different shipping address and shipping method. While that has been done before, what is unique is that each recipient can then have their own cart, making modifications as needed directly inside the checkout stages. Taking this one step further, digital goods as well as subscriptions can go through checkout at the same time as regular products! Inventory is calculated in real time for each item, quantity and recipient!
Results and Impact
With the launch of the new platform for La Tienda, gone were the daily worries surrounding hosting, security and extensibility. The new application is fast, modern and infinitely scalable. However, the proof is in the pudding, and in the post-COVID world, many companies had seen the bubble burst with respect to sales and visits. La Tienda experienced a growth in conversions and AOV as well as a much happier customer base, evidenced by the reduction in calls to the customer care team.
Charts
First Paint is the time between navigation and when the browser first renders pixels to the screen, rendering anything that is visually different from the default background color of the body. It is the first key moment in page load and will answer the question "Has the browser started to render the page?"
We were able to improve the Time To First Paint by a whopping 76% on the replatformed application!
The Halo Security Risk Score dropped from 2355 to 0! This means that the new platform has zero security risks identified by Halo Security. This is a big win and one that provides for a reduction in cost for cyber insurance.
Several factors influenced the reduction in infrastructure issues from 22 over a 7 day period to 0. These included, but are not limited to, database redesign, security built into the application, a self-healing infrastructure and more.
From Tim Harris (La Tienda CEO and Co-Founder)
"Application:
We hired Idextrus to re-platform our legacy ecommerce system that we had been building for the last 15 years or so. Focused on the specialty food and gifting category, we built our site to have all of the features and functions that a company like La Tienda needs. We continually study alternatives, such as Shopify or Magento, but still don’t see any software that checks off all the boxes.As the business continued to grow and we licensed our platform to others, we saw that we needed to rebuild our code base to make it more secure, faster and more efficient. Over two years, Idextrus rebuilt our entire tech stack and we now have a state of the art, best in class platform that utilized a headless structure with a multi tenant back end.
The Idextrus team delivered us a product that was within budget, on time and exceeded our performance expectations. We now feel that we are set for the next chapter of our business growth and were very pleased with the professionalism, diligence and creativity of the Idextrus team.
Hosting:
La Tienda and related companies utilize a custom platform, built by Idextrus, that is hosted on AWS. We have been very happy with the performance during peak traffic periods, the ability to ‘self-heal’ during situations where there were performance issues and the heightened level of security and disaster recovery capability.For the price, we have been happy with the hosting and delivery platform with Idextrus administers and maintains for us. Their superior service and ingenuity, coupled with the AWS backbone has been an ideal combination."
Conclusion
The new platform developed for La Tienda by Idextrus continues to evolve, and the partnership between two companies has been enriched by building and continuously supporting this application together.
Idextrus has furthered its expertise in development and support of modern e-commerce application development and cloud hosting solutions with the launch of this product. You can see clearly the value that was, and continues to be delivered to the team at La Tienda and their partners.
Tell us about your pain points. We know that you have some, and we’re certain that we can work together to build a plan towards resolving them.