Countr is an app that brings people together by making shopping a social experience. It gives users access to trusted recommendations, a platform to showcase their style, and the opportunity to earn money.
Their founder, Manon Roux, makes shoppers’ lives easier by building style tribes around their interests and preferences.
The benefits for users include:
With more than 160 retailers in its network, Countr can truly have an impact on the way users enjoy online shopping by giving them more ways to interact with friends and make recommendations.
Netguru joined Countr’s team in January 2018, when the app’s alpha version required a general reorganisation. Our process involved several steps:
After extensive testing and making sure users would be able to take full advantage of the value it introduces, The new version was ready. It took months and a lot of user testing to polish the personalised feed.
Users who took part in the process left incredibly positive feedback about the app’s look and usability. Soon enough, several celebrities entered talks about extended collaboration with Countr’s founders.
The app isn’t a simple social platform with a beautiful feed. Netguru’s development team took on the challenge of developing complex features and systems, including:
"Netguru took on some legacy code and helped us – they’ve been fantastic on that front. We’ve received a lot of support in terms of thinking about how do we track metrics, how do we design this properly, and how do we build the architecture. We are extremely grateful for making our platform what it is today."
Countr’s user journey needed enough features to gain a competitive advantage, yet it needed to remain intuitive and easy to use.
Product discovery had to be advanced enough to truly reflect users’ preferences and tailor their feeds. The platform also needed influencers to spread the world and build traction. The client already had an extensive network of contacts, allowing for larger impact upon release while turning Countr’s launch into a high-stakes event.
Countr also needed to implement a lot of functionalities to quite a demanding app in a short time – our Ruby on Rails team helped the client take advantage of pre-built "Gems" to do this effectively and in the shortest time.
Ruby "Gems" helped us enable third-party integrations with services such as ‘Elasticsearch’, an open source search and analytic system, and ‘searchkick’, to help enhance the client search process and give better results – our team also implemented an integration with Google Vision.
A future goal for Countr is implementing learning from users’ actions, such as liking or disliking products, and making purchases.
This information could be used to better understand each user’s preferences. It’s not easy for an algorithm to do this, as people like various things for different reasons. They could be attracted by the price, colour, brand or style. A lot of data will be needed to refine the recommendation system to this level.
But it will be worth it. For an online ecommerce platform, keeping up with online shopping trends is mandatory if one does not want to fall behind their competition.
It’s a good time to develop and improve an ecommerce platform.
More and more people shop online, especially on mobile devices as 73% of all online shopping will happen via a mobile device by 2021, according to predictions. Social media is playing a bigger role in the decision-making process, and AI automation is changing the way people interact with retailers.
Personalisation – tailoring the shopping experience to each user – is one of the main trends determining the future of ecommerce, an industry with an exciting future ahead.
Getting this app up and running was not easy. We're super thrilled to work with Netguru. The team have been fantastic on that front. Making this platform look the way it looks now was one of our biggest goals."