Bookworm

UML model, used for content in CS
Architecture overview

Inspiration

One of our teammembers likes to visit his local bookstore every now and then. But he finds it difficult to keep up to date on what is happening in his local shop. If you look at that shop and many other small shops, they have in common that the websites are pretty crappy. There is zero to little conversion on those sites and no way to engage with (potential) customers

What it does

Enter Bookworm! The Amazon for small bookshops. We offer a shared platform for small bookshop retailers to promote their shop; showcase their (personalized to the user) collection; offer promotions and draw the customer in, digitally and physically.

link

How we built it

We built this with the tools we know or wanted to discover. As we were lured into this MACHathon by our friends at Contentstack, Contentstack is where we started from. As we settled on our use-case we added Commercetools, one of our other partners. In one of the Contentstack demos we saw how they integrated CT; we wanted that too :D

From there we of course needed a frontend, a backend service and a place to host. Enter NextJS, .net core and Azure/Azure DevOps. All of our services are containerized, stored in an Azure Container Registry and served from Azure.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a few snags:

How do we allow specific bookshop owners, in Contentstack, access to only their collection of books?
Not all of us have experience with Dockerfiles. How does that work now?
Time. We have clients to make happy, this is quite a bummer, as we really liked doing this machathon! So in all honesty, we not all features made it...

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have worked well together despite not knowing each other beforehand! We have a working app, basic though it is! And from the commerce-engine to the cms to the frontend, we have a complete roundtrip.