It’s been over a year since myself, Emily and Rob left our jobs to focus on Foodzie full time. I haven’t written extensively on what we’ve learned or the choices we’ve made over the past 12 months because things are happening so fast I’ve hardly had a chance to sit back and digest everything that we’ve done and learned. But we are pushing out some large changes and I wanted to give you a little backstory.
At Foodzie, we started talking to our customers on day 1. We began building a prototype tailored directly to the problems of food producers. We built a lot from scratch in Ruby on Rails because there was nothing out there that would be able to work perfectly for our customers. We worked directly with producers to get feedback and design our product. We were able to move very quickly validating a number of product concepts. We used our application to raise funding. We used it to build our customer base. Our product and our team stayed very lean.
We wrote our own shopping cart. We wrote our own CMS. We wrote our own checkout logic. As we looked down the road at features we were going to have to build, we decided it was time to take a different approach.
Gandalf said, “All you have to decide is what you’re going to do with the time you are given,” and that’s very much how we feel at Foodzie. The Foodzie team has better places to put our focus than on building ecommerce features that are already out there ready to be leveraged.
Recently we’ve been working on switching our commerce application to an open source ecommerce platform called Magento – an platform with an amazingly large community. As I publish this, it’s immediately gone live with a new design and many more robust features for our customers.
Now the entire infrastructure of our app is based on an open source project; I can’t tell you how good that makes us feel. We’re thrilled to be joining the Magento community and look forward to giving back.
The adoption of the Magento platform is going to allow us to spend more time learning from and improving our product for our customers. We look forward to this next technological chapter of Foodzie as we continue to provide an unparalleled experience for buying and selling the best artisan food online.
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[...] Stronger More Extensible Platform: The biggest change of all is under the hood. Foodzie is now built on one of the most robust and well-architected eCommerce platforms around. This will afford us the flexibility to quickly iterate on the Foodzie Marketplace. It will also provide our sellers with advanced tools and analytics to better manage their Foodzie shops. You can read more of the technical details in Nik’s post. [...]
zhi tea loves magento, too! we built our site on it and it rocks. new and amazing add-ons seem to come out every day and the support we get on the forums is superb. we are glad foodzie decided to do the same thing. live long and prosper.
-dr. o
Awesome! That's great. Yeah, the community is fantastic. We couldn't have done it without all of thousands of contributors.
I'm a big fan of Magento, but I was disappointed that, seemingly, you chose not to use one of its best features–front loading the shipping and tax costs so the buyer knows the gross cost before they start entering bill to ship to info. How come?
TOM
We're working on getting there. We have considerable customizations on the shipping side. But we understand the frustration that comes from not being able to realize what the shipping is going to cost you. Improvements are on the way. Thanks for the feedback Tom. Please do let us know if you have any more!
What do you think would be a perfect shopping cart gallery for a website selling furniture products around 500 or so?
hey nice site, what extensions are you using on the site? is it all standard or you have custom work done also?
Hi Davie, we're using the community edition.