E-commerce Development for Alternative Medicine Firm

Background

The project team improved the average loading speed of various webpages by six times, immediately demonstrating their technical chops. Adaptability and uncompromising responsiveness are also key highlights.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a creator and seller of hemp extract. We take industrial hemp plants and extract them for various constituents that end up being very health promoting. 

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Opportunity / Challenge

What challenge were you trying to address with Praxent?

We’re a relatively young e-commerce company, and when we first started out, we did all our own website development. It was really basic. We originally started working with another company, but by the end of their year-long contract, we were really dissatisfied with their work. They were always late, always over-charging us, and they weren’t responsive. So we started looking for another company to help us develop our payment platform and redesign our website.

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Solution

What was the scope of their involvement?

Praxent does everything for us in terms of the technical aspects of our website. One of the key challenges in our industry is payment processing; a lot of the systems out there don’t work for us, and we need a lot of custom code. Our original project had to do with our payment gateway solution and automating credit card information for a lesser-known processor, but we’ve been so happy with them that we brought them on board for our entire website redesign. At peak capacity, we had three or four Praxent people working with us, but for the most part, we have two people on staff. We have one primary contact, our team lead. We’re not always in communication, but he’s always accessible when we need him to be.

How did you come to work with Praxent?

We started working with Praxent around October 2016. We just put out a request for bids. One of the main reasons we went with Praxent, as opposed to some of their competitors, was that they were upfront about their payment process. Given the custom nature of our project, we just thought it made sense that they were charging hourly and that they were tracking hours on JIRA so that we could keep tabs on they were specifically working on and make sure it was what we wanted. We’re still tinkering with the old website even as we work on our complete rebranding and website design, and the best part is they can take the code from the old one and apply it to the new one, so it’s not wasted work.

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Results & Feedback

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

When we first started working with Praxent, they ran an audit on our website for performance at different internet bandwidths. After several performance updates, they ran another round of analytics, and the difference was astonishing. We went from a load time of 28 seconds in 3G for our mobile platform to a little over two seconds. They used a process of minification, uglify and concatenation, resulting in a performance increase that averaged six times the speed prior to them coming on board.

How did Praxent perform from a project management standpoint?

Praxent used JIRA to ensure accountability and transparency, and since we had never used JIRA before, they even taught us how to use it.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The most impressive part about Praxent is their accessibility. This past Christmas, we had an issue with one of our shipping websites. Our whole operation was brought to a halt during our busiest time because this one functionality wasn’t working. I was out of town and the owner doesn’t usually work with Praxent directly, but he sent them an email and one of the team members, Rico, was able to respond within the hour, even though it was off-hours during the holiday. They also hold meetings with us however often we need them. We have one weekly meeting that we call our backlog grooming meeting, where we go through all the tickets we’ve created with them and they touch base on where they’re at. Business needs change constantly, and Praxent has consistently been willing to change course at the drop of a hat when we need to modify some aspect of the project.

Are there any areas Praxent could improve?

For me, they’re really setting the bar for what other companies should be doing. They’re the best company we’ve ever worked with.