Shopify, a provider of turnkey hosted e-commerce solutions, today announced its acquisition of MNDCreative, developers of the StoreSync application.

StoreSync extends Shopify’s online store tracking, reporting and management functionality to the Apple iPhone with an integrated mobile interface.

Shopify is a hosted application platform that allows merchandisers to quickly and easily create beautifully customized, full-featured online stores. The Shopify platform allows them to organize products, accept credit card payments through payment gateways, instantly update storefront images and content, track and respond to orders in real time, and manage all aspects of online sales.

The StoreSync mobile interface application provides instant mobile access to online store sales statistics, order processing, shipment status and product and customer information from an iPhone, anytime, anywhere. As part of the acquisition agreement, the StoreSync mobile application will be available exclusively to Shopify customers as Shopify StoreSync.

As a Shopify certified developer partner, MNDCreative was able to use our API to integrate the StoreSync mobile interface into the Shopify system, and they took full advantage of that to create a great application, but there were still limitations to what they could develop and deliver to the market,” commented Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify. “Going forward, we will combine our e-commerce and mobile application expertise to deliver more robust, richer applications that reflect the features and functionality that Shopify customers want and request.”

MNDCreative’s founder and president, Matt Newberry, will join Shopify as Mobile Lead. In his new role, Newberry will be leading development of an ambitious new mobile payment solution.

Both Shopify and MNDCreative are privately held companies; financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Also, we’ve added a snapshot of our logs for each store. Not seeing data? This is the place to check.

We’re aware that the transition hasn’t been as smooth as expected for a small percentage of our customers, and I wanted to write you all personally to ensure the StoreSync community that this has not gone unnoticed.

StoreSync is the first product that our studio, MNDCreative, has released. For the four years prior, we served as a consulting and development group servicing the needs of customers in primarily the e-commerce industry. We’ve not only transitioned StoreSync from beta to release, we’ve also transitioned our company from service-based to product-based as well.

We appreciate the feedback and support of our community, and are committed to delivering on our product.

Please feel free to contact me directly with any questions, concerns, or suggestions.

Matt Newberry
Founder, StoreSync

matt [at] storesync.com

I must say that I’ve been wanting to write this post for some time now. The infrastructure that runs StoreSync was quite the task to establish, however we were able to automate 100% of the operational functions that run continuously. We have 16 servers that power StoreSync, ranging with functions from database hosting, web hosting, and automated CRON jobs.

We’ve been on the Rackspace Cloud now since July, and have had both good and bad experiences with them. Here’s what we’ve encountered:

The Good

The best part about the cloud is that you can instantly deploy any number of servers. We have backup images of all our major functions, and in cases like our automated update system, we can automatically deploy a server on a moment’s notice to handle an increase in load.

Their cloud API is also phenomenal… The ability to manage servers and create new ones via the API is a great feature that we utilize in a major way. Here’s how with our sign up process:

1. Customer creates a new account
2. Customer adds their store
3. We automatically create a new server instance to import all data from the customer
4. When the update is complete, the server automatically deletes itself

The ability to spin off a new server instance that rests outside of our main core group of update servers is a big deal for us. With many stores having 10,000+ orders and  products, we couldn’t afford to have our core infrastructure slowed by the one-time initial imports for each store. With the API, we were able to automate this process, and it’s worked like a charm.

The Bad

No matter where you go on their website, you’re not far from a glance to a blurb about “Fanatical Support”. This is a large reason why we went with Rackspace, as we liked the thought of being able to instantly get help when needed. However, as we found out, this wasn’t always the case.

Our first bad experience came when we contacted the Live Chat for help with issues with our MySQL server. We thought our request was pretty simple, yet our chat “specialist” told us that Cloud Servers were an unmanaged solution, and that they weren’t able to help with our request.

Our second bad experience we had came when an ethernet card went down in one of our servers. Again, we contacted the Life Chat, and after speaking with someone for about 5 minutes, they disappeared. Almost an hour went by while the tech was “checking on our issue”, while we sat and finally gave up. We recreated that particular server instance, deployed a new server, and went on about our way (we still don’t know what went wrong).

Our third bad experience came when we had an issue with the API. We sent an email to their general support account, with information detailing our issue (which later turned out to be a mistake on our part, as we didn’t base64 encode a part of the request). It took 9 days for them to get back to us… far from “fanatical”.

If it weren’t for Robert Collazo, we most likely wouldn’t be with Rackspace any longer. After we tweeted about our frustrations, he contacted us the very next day. Since then, we’ve been able to contact him, and others, directly when we have issues. Regrettably, however, it took us bashing the service publicly before Rackspace stepped up.

Room For Improvement

The Rackspace Cloud web admin needs an update… and fast. To me, it’s sad that their API supports more functionality than their own website does (namely shared IP groups).

With us at one point having had 20+ servers deployed, we’d love to be able to see them grouped together, or at least sortable. Also, want to deploy more than one server at a time? Forget about it. This was a bit of a pain for us in our initial setup, as deploying new servers always took more time than it should have in our opinion.

The Bottom Line

Would we recommend to the Rackspace Cloud to you? It depends on your goals, but yes, we would. The freedom that we feel in the cloud is great, as we know that we will never be bogged down due to resource limits.

We hope that the support issues are behind us, and can say that the benefit that we get from the service outweighs the support issues we’ve had. Fanatical? Not quite…

Enter StoreSync.

Design

StoreSync development started back in November of 2008 with a few books and a copy of Xcode. We started by designing a few of the screens in Photoshop, and then started slicing, and implementing them into Xcode.

The design evolution:

The design of the app will continue to evolve as we listen to customers and enhance the product, but we’re pleased with how far it’s come already. 

Coding

Learning Objective-C (the language behind iPhone programming) was initially quite the challenge, however after a few weeks all of the pieces started falling into place.

The way Apple structures development is truly amazing, and allows for rapid development. Granted, the API can be testing at times, and learning to manage memory was a frustrating process at times, but overall, we had a very positive experience.

The app was approved by Apple on the 12th day after submission, without any issue, much to our delight. We’ve heard horror stories of other developers having to jump through Apple’s hoops, and are glad we didn’t.

Bringing to Market

We’ve been very fortunate to have received a very positive response from our users and platform affiliates, and none have been more behind us than Shopify.

Shopify’s API was a dream to work with, and proved to be the easiest integration we performed. Tobias Lutke, Founder and CEO, was very positive in his feedback, and was a supporter from day one.

Shopify featured our app in their app store and their monthly newsletter, and have been very supportive of the StoreSync vision. We’re looking forward to working with them more in the future.

What’s Next?

We’re constantly working on adding support for new platforms, and also improving the core product. We’ll be introducing order and product modification in our next major version, and are also working to add enhanced support for the planned desktop app.

Our vision for StoreSync is broad, yet focused, and we feel we’ve just scratched the surface.