Behind the App: Brightpearl

Brightpearl is a Retail Operations Platform. Tightly integrated into sales channels, Brightpearl connects sales orders, fulfillment, inventory management, accounting, reporting and planning, warehouse management, replenishment and more. Designed specifically for retail business models, Brightpearl is built to reliably handle peak trading, integrates with the full retail tech ecosystem, is omnichannel-native, is the system of record for key trading data, provides real-time trading insights and is automated so you can stay in control and manage by exception.

Brightpearl’s world-class BigCommerce connector is built to manage high orders volumes and manage the complexities of a growing retail or wholesale business.

We recently sat down with the team at Brightpearl to talk about their journey to building their BigCommerce connector and what’s next on their roadmap.

Tell me about Brightpearl.

Brightpearl is a complete retail operations platform built specifically for brands, retailers, and wholesalers. Designed to scale as you grow, Brightpearl streamlines a business’s back office — from order management, replenishment, retail accounting, inventory, warehouse management, and more. Our mission is to automate the back office so merchants can spend their time and money growing their business.

Brightpearl launched our first order and inventory app on BigCommerce in 2013 to allow customers to reduce fulfillment costs and increase order and inventory accuracy. Now we’re adding the Brightpearl Buy Online Pickup In Store (BOPIS) app to give retailers the opportunity to offer their consumers the flexibility to buy items online and pick them up (often that same day) from their desired location.

Why did you decide to build this app?

A true partnership in this space involves much more than just a technical integration. It requires constant communication as well as the skillset to build and create best-in-class solutions. Our partnership with BigCommerce works so well because together we understand the need for both of those aspects. We speak with their sales and client development teams daily to ensure we know exactly what our customers need to grow their business more efficiently while delivering industry-leading solutions that solve their biggest challenges.

After hearing directly from the BigCommerce team about the growing number of retailers in search of a more affordable solution for their BOPIS needs, we realized there was an opportunity to really create value for our customers and strengthen our partnership with BigCommerce.

The feedback we received was focused on the growing demands of consumers telling merchants they want to receive their purchases as quickly and easily as possible, without paying more for that convenience. To ensure the most frictionless experience possible for consumers, merchants need a real-time inventory sync across all their online and storefront locations.

While BOPIS certainly helps solve the need for instant gratification, the only options for retailers that included real-time inventory updates were complex, expensive, and custom BOPIS integrations with their ecommerce store. As a result, this type of advanced fulfillment was typically reserved for big-box retailers. And we didn’t think that was fair. Especially when you consider the benefits of BOPIS — things like, reduced shipping and return costs for both consumers and merchants, and the huge in-store upsell opportunity.

We started to examine this need further by speaking with mutual customers to ensure we understood the full user story and how our two softwares could combine to offer this competitive advantage to mid-market merchants.

Tell us about the journey to build the app.

As with all of our product developments and enhancements, we started with customer interviews. By asking questions to merchants who have already discussed these omnichannel workflows with us, we were then able to narrow down our list of assumptions into a prioritized view of actual requirements.

From there, we entered wireframing and building out the consumer and merchant journeys of the project. We then took those back to our stakeholder customers and connections at BigCommerce for validation, while also getting the technical engagements started for costing.

With this project, the scope is pretty tight, meaning there aren’t a whole load of features to discuss and drop into subsequent phases. But through constant feedback loops, we knew what we were building was going to be valuable, and used from day one to enable our merchants to competitively put their customer’s journey first.

How did you build it?

We wanted to use the best and most flexible tools for the job, which is why we decided that we would use Vue js web components for our storefront UI. Web components have now received great browser support, and act as actual elements on a page utilizing the shadow dom. Having the awesome reactivity of a framework like Vue and the ability to drop in our UI anywhere made the project much easier to work with.

Most of our API calls were made to Brightpearl’s database. We use the customer’s cart content to find the warehouse availability, but it would not have been as smooth without BigCommerce’s storefront API to consume the data in a quick and readable manner.

We used Google Firebase for our backend and hosting because of its ease of use and for the speed advantage of being hosted on the same servers as BigCommerce.

Development needed to move quickly, so a lot of changes and iterations were done on the fly, and working with BigCommerce made the process much easier. The framework is malleable, allowing for easy future changes. We hope to continually improve the app through feedback from store owners.

What technical challenges did you encounter?

Being able to manipulate in the Optimized One Page Checkout proved to be more difficult than originally anticipated. We had to adjust our focus slightly making this version more limited from a code standpoint. But by working with the BigCommerce staff and APIs, we were able to troubleshoot this quickly and adjust our plans with minimal interruption. And the good news is the open-sourced Optimized One-page Checkout is coming soon! In the meantime, we used the Script Manager to inject the code for our customization.

Other challenges involved accounting for different warehouse inventories and availability through transfers, and the fringe use cases for user error or other situations. However, the robust open BigCommerce API coupled with the flexibility of Vue js made overcoming this obstacle much more manageable.

Tell about success post-release.

Nothing is more rewarding than the successful utilization of our apps. Knowing our features and functionality have grown a merchant’s business by increasing revenue, saving on costs, or helping grow consumer satisfaction is why we do what we do.

The mantra, “Our success is your success,” has never been truer. We ask customers to trust Brightpearl by putting us at the heart of their growing business — and we’re humbled by this trust; it pushes us to improve every single day.

In our conversations with merchants, we’ve learned how important it is to develop an app that has true functions BigCommerce store owners need — functionality that solves real world ecommerce problems. Don’t assume you know what they need. Instead, ask questions, verify those needs, and ask more questions to confirm again. Another critical tip is to make sure you build the app on modern code frameworks with scalable server architecture — the BOIPS app is built on Google’s Firebase.

Last, but certainly not least — test, test, test!

Finally, What’s Next for Brightpearl?

Brightpearl gives customers a number of different avenues to contribute feedback — whether that’s through their Technical Account Managers, Project Managers, Implementation Consultants, or even our product team directly.

We’ve already received ideas for the next phases of our development and look forward to adding to that functionality once the app is live. In the meantime, we’ll be relying on the feedback from BigCommerce to ensure what we developed is line with the correct user story, and then figure out how to adjust features when necessary.

For the next round of enhancements, it comes down to really refining the consumer’s journey and how they want to fulfill their orders. In a world where customer satisfaction means everything, it’s absolutely critical that the functionality we provide helps make the consumer’s buying journey as frictionless as possible. Based on the feedback we get, there will be enhancements that only strengthen this focus so that these merchants can experience every benefit BOPIS has to offer to their business.

We’d like to thank Brightpearl for sharing their story and giving us an inside look into their development process. You can learn more and find the Brightpearl’s omnichannel retail management platform and their BOPIS app in the BigCommerce Marketplace