DEITY BUILT PROGRESSIVE WEB APPS BEFORE GOOGLE MADE IT THE STANDARD

Photo: Deity

Posted by Olga Koltsova | June 4, 2019

When an e-commerce company is progressive and has grown as big as a small webshop, but has not yet reached the turnover of a store like Zalando, it becomes difficult for this online business to maintain the rapid growth pace. It is precisely for this group that a software company from the Eindhoven district of Strijp-T - DEITY - has developed tools that can help medium-sized online shops to scale their business.

EXPERIENCE IN E-COMMERCE
"DEITY was once a start-up, but it was founded by a group of people with 15 to 20 years of experience in e-commerce," say Jamie Maria Schouren and Roland Bastiaansen, the co-founders of DEITY. "We had been working in e-commerce for a long time for companies like de Bijenkorf, Ferrari, HP, and Zalando - at that time, it was their very first online store with 10 orders per day. When we worked with those online stores, we realized that as companies grow quickly, they face issues with scalability, website architecture, and their current software. At the same time, we also saw that large companies were spending millions and millions on building new software architectures, and that was not accessible to fast-growing companies that couldn't afford to spend millions on software." That's why DEITY decided to build software for online retailers with a turnover of €1-20 million - they make up a significant portion of all e-commerce companies.

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
"It took us a few years to develop our software," says Schouren. "While we were building, we created prototypes with real customers. Because that went so well, we decided to enter the mainstream market, introduce our software as a service platform, and even build an open-source product - which means software developers from all over the world can download and use it without purchasing a license."

The open-source software mentioned here is the front-end product DEITY Falcon - it was released in October 2018.

"In the first month after the release, we had 400 downloads, and last month we already had 16,000. The geographical distribution of our users is also broad - initially it was mainly England, the Netherlands, and Germany, but last month we even had downloads from Nigeria, India, and other countries around the world. It's interesting to see how quickly it has grown in those five months," says Schouren.

While Deity Falcon is a front-end product, the Headless Merchant Centre is a back-end platform, built entirely modular. DEITY releases the modules of the Headless Merchant Centre one by one.

DEITY office at Strijp-T (photo © DEITY)

INNOVATIVE E-COMMERCE SOFTWARE
The co-founders of DEITY say that the major advantage of their products lies in the modular architecture. "Our software is decentralized – many people are familiar with this term from Blockchain. Decentralization means that all distinct services such as Product Management or Automatic Management become separate functions of a product. In the software architecture, they are also separated. So you can have Stock Management as a complete service, but in DEITY's products, it is data-based, so it takes the form of a small add-on for a website."

"When you realize that what you have already built becomes a new standard, it's time to launch a business."

DEITY describes the software itself as flexible and emphasizes that the underlying basic idea is the "FIRE principle" - English for flexible, integrable, reliable, expandable. "That principle means that people can do what they want with our products," says Jamie Maria Schouren. "What makes our products innovative is that we don't build replacement software - we create add-ons for customers' existing software. That's why we collaborate with many major e-commerce providers such as BigCommerce and Adyen. DEITY is not a new competitor in the market - we are the ones who ensure that e-commerce software companies can increase their value."

"Our customers are no longer directly the store owners, but the agencies and web developers who build the online stores for the companies. As additional services, we offer workshops and consultancy so that our customers learn how to use DEITY's software and make money with it."

WORKING TOGETHER WITH GIANTS
DEITY was founded in 2017 and has since grown to become a partner of major companies such as Google. "It's really great to see that a small company from Eindhoven is on the radar of such giants and that they are working with us to make the internet a better place," says Schouren. She adds: "By making the internet a better place, we mean building front-end technology that provides a really cool experience for a customer. We combine the technologies of native apps with a website, so that you can do everything you can do with native applications also with websites – such as sending push notifications and working offline. This means that you can give an app-like feel to your website and build higher customer engagement. We see that companies using this kind of combined technology increase their conversion rates and sometimes double their revenue within a few months of starting to work with this software."

PROGRESSIVE WEB APPS
"When we started building software that combines the experience of both web and native applications, Google suddenly came up with the information that combining both technologies would set a new standard for web development - now called Progressive Web Apps (PWA). When you realize that what you have already built is becoming a new standard, it's time to launch a company. When Google heard that we had the PWA technology, they offered to discuss it with us and ensure that our customers can use these products."

"It was a gamble, but that's what you do as an entrepreneur."

Dat is echter niet allemaal uit de lucht komen vallen. "Eerlijk gezeggd hadden we hier bij DEITY al wel verwacht dat er een dergelijke standaard zou verschijnen omdat we de bedrijven die worstelden met de problemen van flexibiliteit en schaalvergroting hadden gezien en we met een oplossing voor die problemen waren gekomen. Sommige mensen zeiden destijds dat we gek waren en dat onze tools te veel toekomstgericht zijn, zodat niemand ze zou gebruiken. Desondanks waren de resultaten goed. Het was een gok, maar dat is wat je als ondernemer doet – het had fout kunnen gaan, maar dat is niet gebeurd. Nu zien we de brede toepassing van onze technologie. We spreken op veel conferenties – we zijn in New York, Las Vegas en andere plaatsen over de hele wereld geweest. Nog maar een jaar geleden vertelden we mensen wat de nieuwe standaard is. Als we nu naar conferenties gaan, vragen mensen ons hoe ze ermee kunnen werken – ik zie dat als een grote verschuiving. Magento, een Adobe-bedrijf, noemde ons zelfs de voorloper van de nieuwe trend in e-commerce technologie – we waren erg blij om dat te horen."

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