Collaborating for Success: Custom Software Development for Ammo America's Price Aggregator Platform
Introduction
Ammo America approached us with a vision for a brand new platform. They only had an idea and a couple of rough designs.
The client was looking for a stable custom software development partner that will lead the process & build the platform.
HackSoft was a perfect fit for this, so we started building immediately.
The challenge
The vision was to create a public platform, that’s effectively a price aggregator for a very specific niche, where you can compare products from different retailers.
Due to the competitive space, the platform had 3 very important requirements:
Good UX.
Blazing fast website speed.
Accurate information.
On top of that, we helped our client with figuring out the specifics of the product, by actively participating in discussions, proposing ideas and building proof of concepts.
The solution
In order to meet the requirements & to deliver the platform on time, we decided to leverage the combined power of both Next.js and Django.
Next.js on Vercel - a powerful combination for the frontend
From the very beginning, we knew that both UX and website speed are important for the publicly facing part of the platform.
That’s why we decided to leverage the power of Next.js, running on Vercel.
With a mix of different rendering strategies (client side, server side & static site generation), we achieved great results:
Django - a mature choice for the backend
In order to meet the needs of the business logic, the data ingestion & the search, we decided to leverage the combined power & maturity of Django & Postgres.
Relying on such a mature set of tools made the backend development streamlined & effective.
Caching
The platform’s performance is of extreme importance. That’s why we introduced caching on different levels:
CDN to cache the static files.
Next.js on Vercel, using static site generation + on-demand incremental static regeneration, as our primary rendering strategy.
Redis-based cache on the backend, to reduce roundtrips to the database.
The result
The result is a live platform, that’s up and running.
And since the platform receives constant feedback from end users, HackSoft is still engaged in software development, product discussions and fast iterations, constantly bringing new experience to production.
Here’s what our client has to say about our work together:
We are incredibly impressed with the performance, speed of development, technical knowledge, critical thinking and solution suggestions that HackSoft brought to the table. They provided the perfect combination of software solutions to create a powerful, fast and accurate platform. Their caching strategies and attention to detail allowed us to deliver a high-quality product that exceeded our expectations.
We would highly recommend HackSoft for any software development project.
