Bash powers multi-channel e-commerce with Strapi to go live in 7 months

Bash didn’t always exist. Prior to its origination, the group was made up of 17 e-commerce websites and 2 mobile apps. In an attempt to migrate 10+ brand websites and two mobile apps into a single consolidated platform, bash.com, it was necessary to provide each brand with a first class experience to manage its store presence on Bash within 7 months.

Shaheen Karodia, Engineering Team Lead at Bash, was asked to develop an easy to use system for all stores and departments to visually merchandise their products. Users needed to be able to update their content in real-time. From a single tool, users needed to be able to drive content for both the app and the web. With all hands on deck in rewriting Bash’s app and website, Shaheen’s team needed a solution that allowed them to move quickly with little engineering effort.

Storefronts represent the individual sites “home” on Bash. A storefront is a page with a series of one or more components that flow from top to bottom. Shaheen’s team found this very easy to model in Strapi as it is a repeatable component and contained within that component is a relation to a single connection. Given the very nature and needs of each store, that connection is highly customizable with multiple dynamic zones and sub-components to meet all use cases.

Many variations can be produced and each of these variations has its own set of toggles and drop downs producing an even greater number of rendering results.

The Storefront collection managed in Strapi is queried by Strapi’s generated REST APIs. This feeds into a small express app, “Backend for Frontend.” Backend for Frontend does most of the heavy lifting, it interfaces with the catalog APIs to fetch product data and transforms Strapi data into a more compact and easier format for the frontends to work with. Bash’s app and website query this Backend for Frontend and render the storefronts based on this data.

The storefront collection managed in Strapi allows brands to seamlessly build out spotlights that advertise their brand. Brands can easily add product carousels and product shelves to their storefronts while targeting specific users.

In an attempt to migrate 10+ brand websites and 2 mobile apps into a single consolidated platform Bash needed to provide each brand with a first class experience to manage their store presence within 7 months. Shaheen firmly believes that his team would not have met that deadline without an open-source, headless CMS like Strapi.