We built an award winning partnership tool to enable innovative collaborative ecommerce solutions.
Alvio came to us with a big ask – they needed a custom app capable of connecting ecommerce stores across multiple platforms, to sync stock, sales, and order fulfilment. What’s more, it had to be able to deliver some serious volume, speed and security. That required our team to build a highly capable and unique app from scratch, meeting some challenging demands, and even winning an award in the process.
Alvio is a platform designed around collaborative ecommerce. The concept is to seamlessly connect merchants’ stores across popular ecommerce platforms, to allow the sharing of inventory on digital storefronts, and automatic syncing of order data.
What does that mean exactly?
Stronger together is the core philosophy of Alvio. The idea is that small-to-medium sized brands and retailers can partner up, and pool their resources in a win-win scenario.
Suppliers can have their products listed in all of their partners’ stores – while retailers earn a commission on all additional sales they handle. Sales automatically sync with inventory across all linked stores, and orders are fulfilled by the suppliers, as usual. As Alvio describes it, the platform allows partners to “Move Data, Not Products.”
Meanwhile, the goal of all this is to boost average cart values, and increase reach for independent retailers – at a time when many are struggling to compete with the marketplace giants such as Amazon and Alibaba.
The concept was fantastic… but right from the start, we knew it was a project that would require some serious work to bring it to life.
The Alvio platform was always going to be a challenging app to develop. Creating a “code-free and hassle-free” user experience often belies the complexity beneath the hood required to deliver it.
During the initial stages of development, the app had many multifaceted requirements and a number of distinct engineering challenges. Of course it had to have seamless and intuitive UX, be fast and reliable with near faultless security. However, it also needed to gracefully manage multiple – and exponentially growing – data relationships, especially if Alvio was going to convince major brands to trust this app as an important conduit in their business.
Added to all that, with the requirement to work across multiple ecommerce platforms, we would need to build effortless data relationships that managed compatibility behind the scenes.
With so much to consider going into this project, we began, as we always do, by diving deep via our workshop sessions. Here we brought the team together and itemised all the key aspects and requirements of the app… with the goal to tease out all the unknowns, concerns and ideas for how we would approach the project efficiently.
Feature Planning
We began by assessing a clear list of objectives. This was more than just an “MVP,” we wanted to establish exactly the key features that Alvio needed to deliver on its promise. After some discussion, we distilled this down to the following core aspects:
In addition to building out the engineering challenge, it was important that the app had a memorable brand. Inspira’s creative team stepped up to develop the identity for Alvio. We started by delving into what the app meant to our audience, and then worked through multiple ideas before arriving at the brand you recognise now.
The logo and brand language was intentionally designed to be simple and direct. We used a stylised O to express the “syncing” of data, bringing to life a core aspect of what makes Alvio tick. That stylised O lent itself well to animation and multiple uses which can be seen in place across App UX, Shopify App store submission, and beyond.
As we developed the concept for Alvio it quickly became clear that building an ecom platform, rather than simply a Shopify app, was going to provide Alvio with more independence and scope for growth opening up the promise of friction-free collaboration not just between stores but between stores and platforms.
As a result this meant Inspira needed to help Alvio make a significant pivot in its development approach with a focus on scalability, APIs and interoperability. Inspira’s agile approach to managing and resourcing projects really came into its own here – allowing us to quickly respond, break down the key tasks and work out what we could keep or what needed to change.
For an app that would be such an important component in a business partnership it was vital that stability, speed and security were paramount. Given that Alvio also has huge potential to scale, we needed to build the foundations of the project in such a way that it would be ready.
As part of our approach we selected a modular, vertically and horizontally scaling cloud-based architecture, which allowed us to add new capacity rapidly. Vertically (for demand spikes) it can be achieved within an hour, and horizontally (for long-term capacity) within 2-3 days.
To maintain uptime and reliability the server has no less than three instances with two redundant backups. This enables us to maintain service even in the unlikely event that two servers go offline at the same time. Even in the very unlikely event that all three servers go offline, we built in recovery to Alvio that means it can be restored from backup within the hour.
To maintain performance we use a load balancer and sharding which helps route traffic intelligently to the least busy resources behind the scenes. This means that Alvio’s only data speed limitations are the platforms it connects to.
The Inspira dev team put some of their very best work into this. Creating a tool that was lightning fast to operate – a shared product appears almost instantly in a connected retailer’s store, and order information is pushed back just as quickly.
It meant that just recently Alvio was able to onboard the Nissan Formula E Team from sign-up to successfully launching a synced product partnership (complete with a fully-stocked store page), in less than one hour!
The Alvio platform has been a phenomenal success. There are now more than 3,000 product lines listed on the Alvio directory, with new partnerships being formed weekly – including between some very high profile clients, with names such as Nissan, Barmy Army, DJ Micky Finn, and Wolverhampton Wanderers FC, now active and opening up partnerships.
Importantly, the platform is demonstrating positive proof of concept and market fit, with users reporting a 25% ABV increase and as much as 1160% ROI: a fantastic reward for the hard work and dedication that has gone, and continues to go into building stability, scalability and ease-of-use with the Alvio application.
The Alvio platform was recently recognised with an award for “Best New eCommerce Tech/App” by the eCom Collab Club in November 2023, a result that we’re deeply proud to have played such a key role in.
