Ecommerce Event Registrations

Requirement

The previous events website was part of main Wordpress website, using a 3rd party plugin that was very slow, unstable and had limited integration options. Resulting in missed revenue and poor user experience due to instability and performance issues.

Solution

A new serverless solution was created to address both performance and reliability issues, using Contentful as a headless CMS to provide event details, ticket allocations and assets.

Stripe payment gateway was used for ecommerce functionality, also providing offline invoicing, useful for larger events which may not be fulfilled through the website.

Firebase was used to store order details and served via a custom dashboard or CSV export to access attendee details.

Transactional confirmation emails were sent using Campaign Monitor API and transactional email templates.

The website was built using Gatsby (v2), statically generated and hosted using Netlify.

AWS lambda functions were used for 3rd party API calls to provide dynamic functionality, protect secrets and encapsulate functionality. Serverless framework was used to deploy lambda functions to AWS. This was prior to Netlify releasing their own Netlify functions.

Future

While the website was a great success and provided a performant and stable solution, all within free tier hosting for the charity. The decision was made to move to a Shopify store to provide a wider range of ecommerce features, such as sale prices, PDF tickets and so on, without the need for custom development. Shopify also provided a simplified user admin experience, rather than the more technical relational content model used by Contentful.