One more beaver
The biggest piece of news for March is that we got Rocci Alvarez to help us grow. I’ve been talking for a long time about getting help in the marketing sphere, so I am really excited to have an experienced person to guide us!
Rocci’s focus will be primarily on ArbTask, and soon there will be cool stuff like social media posts, SEO, and just better copy overall 🙂
ArbTask Affiliate
We are launching an affiliate program for ArbTask. I would really love to have more folks using the tool and share their feedback and having a reward program seems very much aligned with that.
Aukro app
We are making very good progress on the Shoptet-Aukro app, too. Which would not be possible without such great support for the whole AUKRO team.
There were several great enhancements this month. But to list a few:
Server costs 2
In the last month bulletin I shared issues with server costs. I was anable to get a definitive answer from the Google tooling or their support, but I suspected the culprit was the way our product search was build.
It was using this live subscription setup, when the data on the screen updates right away when something changes in database (say backend job creates an offer for product). That is great UI as user don’t need to refresh anything and they always see current data.
However with such a big collection of products for each seller that led to many re-reads of the same documents and then our Firestore bill when to the moon:)
I’ve rebuilt that part of the code, and our costs went down by 80%, which is great!
Product variants
Another major rewrite concerns the product variants. In the e-commerce world, it is common that a product has several different variants. It could be the colour, size, or even the rarity of a Pokémon card. Generally, each variant can have different pricing and stock state, among other things
On the other hand, Aukro being a primary a third party marketplace, doesn’t have support for it. We had to do a lot of one-to-many mappings that needed to work in both directions to support variants.
Meaning not only do we need to create multiple offers for a single product, but also to keep track of stock for individual variants.
Career and job board app
Our Career and Job board app continues to mature as more and more users are sharing their workflows and therefore hitting missing features 🙂
This month we tried to make of the users happy, by adding custom filtering and automated email notifications.
This app continues to be our top 3 performer and is poised to cross the $ 1k monthly recurring revenue soon.