Inflooense

Problem Domain

Inflooense is a performance based referral program for retailers, who want to utilize the selling power of consumers - anyone who has social media following and is passionate about their products. Inflooense enables consumers to become influencers each time they shop. A more affordable and more effective way to utilize influence marketing, Inflooense is an iPhone app for consumers, a plugin for eCommerce software for Retailers, an admin panel for platform Owners, and a brand website. Featuring in-app cash earnings, brand analytics, Shopify and Magento integration, and so much more, it’s a brand new way to enable online retailers to leverage the social media followings of their customers. It’s an easy, risk-free, hassle-free way for retailers to market their brands and expand their customer base while collecting important analytics, all in one place.

Solution

When he approached us, We have understood his mission and challenges on getting the MVP version. We had a preliminary discussion to roll out MVP version 1.0 in iPhone platform in 3 months time period.

We have assigned a dedicated team of Developers and QA to work closely with Customer and Backend developer to work on this project. The key features covered in the App for 1.0 includes Social Login, Retailers List, Hypes done list, Rewards earned and Request Withdrawal. Shopify partners who wish to be in inflooense platform will get listed so they can directly sell from here and also indicates to Shopify consumers which store products are available for hypes. Consumers can create hype by uploading a picture wearing it and provide a few line descriptions of their experience and share it with social media like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. When anyone of their friends purchases the same product use these links then they will get reward points. The accumulation of reward points can be converted into US Dollars and that can be redeemed and transferred into your account.

Process

We identified, communication as one of the key elements to get more transparency and effectively discuss the suggestions that we put forward. So as per the client’s suggestion, we communicated with the client on a daily basis regarding the status of the work through “Redmine”. We raised issues and suggestions through the portal and categorised, prioritised and finally we rollout the first version.

We have delivered Beta release in 2.5 months time and appstore approved build in exactly 3 month duration. Client has appreciated the way we collaborated with them in their time zone to complete this project and quality of the deliverables.

Social media integration for iOS 11

We faced few challenges when the app during the development has to be migrated from iOS 10 to iOS 11. Apple removed social accounts from settings of iOS 11. As we were using default settings information of facebook and twitter for signup/sign-in process and due to the removal of settings from iOS 11, we removed the entire process. For Facebook integration, we used FB SDK and Graph APIs, and completely changed the entire flow including the share operation inside the app. For Twitter, we chose the OAuth way to integrate it. At this time of development, there wasn’t any predefined tool or library available as open source to get the understanding. So we have gone through the OAuth working process and rollout the twitter integration using OAuth.

Sharing the hype through instagram

At the time of development, instagram stopped providing support of share APIs. Instagram introduced new privacy and usage policies in sharing the content. App couldn’t share automated contents via instagram. So client decided to remove instagram share option from the app. When client was thinking about the removal of a feature, we were trying to keep the feature with an alternate approach. So the team suggested instead of removing the share via instagram option, we can implement it with a minor user interaction. The content to be shared is already copied to the clipboard programmatically and the image to be shared is already available in the photos (aka gallery). While tapping on share via instagram, the inflooense app will open the instagram app and open the post creation screen of instagram. Now user just need to paste the content and select the picture. User no need to worry about searching for the picture, the last saved picture is our hyped picture, that’s the trick. Client was so happy to have the feature in one way or another.