Signature Client Portal Case Study

• Posted5/12/2021

About the client

Signature Champions is one of the US top-players in the custom jewelry niche. Their main business direction is Sports Championship rings manufacturing. Championship rings are produced for multiple teams from the US, Canada and other countries.

Business goals

Signature had been actively growing due to their great sales team, customer service and high level of their products. At the same time, the IT part was a bit behind and could not meet the constantly growing number of clients, operations, sales and amount of data that should be stored and analyzed. This led to a business decision of building a Portal that should solve the following problems:

• The Portal should allow new and existing customers to place orders
• The Portal should take care of payments
• The Portal should provide a way for Sales, Customer Support and Marketing teams to get customer data and operate in the most efficient way
• The Portal should be integrated with 3rd party systems for Shipping, Marketing, Data reporting

Technical Stack

The technical solution was taken based on the provided requirements and business goals. The client has already used some systems like Hubspot, Shipstation and PayFlow Pro by Paypal, so it was important to make sure that the newly built portal is seamlessly integrated with those existing systems.

After evaluating of several options we decided to build the portal with a proven and flexible stack that included:

• Laravel framework
• Laravel Forge + bitbucket used for deployment and server management
• Custom design built from scratch
• MySQL database
• REST API integrations

In a year after the portal launch we have also implemented a fully-functional ecommerce store built with Magento 2 that offered an option to order completely custom jewelry made with a visual Ring builder.

Portal overview

Here’s the diagram showing the Laravel client portal architecture.

Portal became a system-of-record and the main element of the client’s IT infrastructure with other services built around that core.

API-based integrations allowed us to use the power of top-notch solutions:

• Twilio was used to build SMS communication flows with the customers and also IP phone calls.
• Sendgrid was integrated to automate email workflows
• We used Google Data Studio to provide the client with multiple data-based reports required by Sales & Marketing teams as well as executives
• Hubspot was a primary marketing automation tool
• Shipstation was used to manage shipments and print shipping labels
• Magento e-commerce platform was used for a custom shopping experience. Order data was then synced to Laravel-based portal and from there it flowed into all those additional systems

Outcome

First of all, the portal met the requirements and allowed to automate the client interaction, gain visibility on data and connect all pieces of IT infrastructure together, providing a seamless experience for the clients and for the internal team.

Apart from that, automated processes also made it possible for the client to get rid of some manual procedures like payment processing and follow-ups, so the payment processing team was reduced and employees could work more effectively on the other tasks.