Espresso Workspace

A Brief Overview

The Espresso Displays team reached out for create a better user experience for customer onboarding and management of their devices (warranty/support) that most electronic businesses lack. The initial version of this platform, allows users to sign in and view their purchased devices/accessories, manage their warranty and software drivers and raise support tickets/find FAQ.

In a future version, this platform will also evolve into a hub for management of devices and software integrations to support a more efficient working process, similar to Shift.

The Features

• Support ticket system
• Management of users (Create, Update, Edit, Delete)
• Management of products (CRUD)
• Batch user csv imports
• Blog connected to CMS
• Warranty system

The Tech

A server side rendering framework Sapper/Svelte was used. The very similar syntax to vanilla HTML and javascript structure made it an interesting choice to use for this project. To get this project up and running and delivered in a short time, I opted for firebase products such as Firestore as database, Firebase auth and Firebase cloud functions for any server logic processes (sending emails, managing users, fetching cms data).

The use of cloud functions removed a lot of overhead that would traditionally be run on the server routes, keeping the running costs very low. Additionally, the web app was hosted on Vercel (previously Zeit) as serverless cloud functions.

Not a single cent was spent on server costs so far and it's running in production with around 100 concurrent users/day. This is obviously a very low traffic count, but it can scale nicely and cost effective way.

Another component added was Sanity Content Management System for content updates such the blog, support FAQ's and product information.

Challenges

The most challenging aspect would be designing the best architecture for the platform to ensure flexibility in the future when additional features needed to be built on top. Since a core aspect of their current business revolves around Shopify ecommerce, integrations were needed for inventory, product SKU's et al.

Demo Link

Unfortunately because the content is restricted by user privileges, a full demo cannot be provided. The actual application is found here https://app.espressodisplays.com.au. You will need to purchase a espresso display monitor to get access though...