BoxesApp provides administration and client interfaces for selling items
grouped together in a box. As detailed below it was first and foremost
developed to sell and deliver boxes of organic vegetables, but there is no
reason why it couldn't be used to sell any type of widget in a box.
BoxesApp is not a standalone online shopping service, it integrates with a
Shopify store and both the container box and the included items are actual
store products. The screenshot of the client interface is from Streamside
Organics who grow and market organic vegetables. The subscription option itself
is an integration with an established subscription service by Recharge Payments
Each week the boxes can be updated by the store owner with products according
to season and harvest. At Streamside Organics they offer small, medium, and
large boxes and are currently delivering close to 200 boxes per week. The
customer may swap out products for another item from a list of available
products, and are able to add items into the box from the same list. They
may also change the quantity of any item in the box.
A custom box is also offered which has no included items and the customer can
build their box from the list of available products.
[image: BoxesApp client facing interface]
With the spread of the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus Aotearoa went into its first
nationwide lockdown on the 25 March 2020. At the time Streamside Organics (then
operating as Spring Collective) was using BuckyBox to sell and market their
vegetable boxes. They had around 30-40 box customers, some on a Community
Supported Agriculture type scheme, and others paying weekly. For that first
lockdown the rapid uptick in customers meant that the site struggled to cope.
Furthermore, at the time, BuckyBox was indicating that it would cease to
operate at the end of 2020 (that hasn't come about as it happens). Looking for
another way to market their boxes online to a locked down population,
Streamside Organics signed up for a Shopify store and started adding products.
Community Supported Agriculture
However, a Shopify store cannot offer the sort functionality that BuckyBox
offers. To be effective the store needed to allow:
Most, but not all, of these requirements could be met using a stock standard
store but required a lot of admin time. I think that Shopify is a fully
featured web commerce software platform; furthermore, apps can be built on top
of the extensive api that comes with the platform. Third party apps can add
features and deliver unique customer experiences.
At the time I was working on the farm with the harvesting crew. With a
background that includes a good deal of coding, and a desire to help, I put my
hand up.
Broadly speaking the technical requirements of a Shopify App encompass the
entire depth of a computer system application, and straddles two separate web
development domains; the front end and the back end. In the case of BoxesApp
the front end has two parts, that for the customer can be seen in the
screenshot above, and another is needed for administration of the boxes. For
the back end a database and a web server are required, webhooks need to be
registered to collect orders from the store, emails will need to be sent, etc.
My first decision was the most basic - which coding language to use? Most of my
back end coding experience was with Python. I spent a couple of years working
on a Zope application in the first years of the century, following that I
worked on numerous Django projects with Encode. However, since its beginnings
in 2009 NodeJS has grown in popularity as a runtime server environment, and the
idea of using the same coding language for both front and back end development
appealed to me.
The second decision was regarding the database. I am familiar with PostgreSQL
(the database of choice for Django applications) so I began with that. But I
recalled the ease of using the Zope object database and so soon switched to
MongoDB, a decision I do not regret.
My third major decision was how to build the front end. I'd been messing with
DHTML since around 1999 and I had been playing with React in recent years.
React is used by Shopify and most Shopify app development articles focused on
React, so React was used in my first explorations. But I don't actually like
React (apologies to all aficionados) so when I came across Crank it was with
great relief and a breath of fresh air. Discarding React for Crank has the
added advantage of greatly diminished asset file size. Crank was only
introduced in April 2020 so it was brand new at the time; my gut feeling has
paid off for me. Thank you Brian Kim.
Settling on a build/bundle management tool also took me some thought and
experimentation, and a bit of grief on the way. Without running through all of
the alternatives that I tried to use, I'll just say that I settled on Vite and
2½ years in I could not recommend it highly enough for its ease of use and
sensible defaults.
The final noteworthy decision was one of deployment. I did try out a couple of
cloud options but (and this may well be my lack of experience) frankly they did
not pan out too well for me. So I went back to being my own sysadmin and using
a virtual private server from Rimuhosting with whom I've been a customer since
2004 (excepting the years 2018-2020 after solemnly swearing that I'd never code
again).
I began the work in my own time, evenings and weekends. As pressure built to
get it up and working I was given some paid time to work on the application.
Then I took several weeks unpaid leave to finally get an initial version
working. I did not keep good records of the time spent but by then it was
certainly running up over a hundred hours. Finally though, I did have it
running in production and during lockdowns the farm was sending out close to
400 boxes a week.
As the end of 2020 approached, BuckyBox was expected to shut down and it was
apparent that I needed to duplicate the subscription functionality of
BuckyBox. Shopify itself did not support subscriptions at the time, though did
introduce a subscription api in early 2021. So in September/October 2020, I was
pouring my spare time into building a subscription solution for BoxesApp.
Streamside is a small business and cannot feasibly invest money into software
development, particularly as I was unable to make an estimate of the time to
complete the task. But I had made a commitment. They proposed to me that I
should charge them a monthly fee for the app, which must cover my server costs,
maintenance, upgrades, and feature requests. I really only had two choices, 1.
accept the proposal or, 2. withdraw my support. Because of my personal sense of
obligation the second option was out of the question.
Below is a screenshot of how I duplicated the BuckyBox functionality as a
separate but integrated application. It requires an amount of manual
administration effort from Streamside. Either:
The database contains the following tables:
I made the conscious decision that no sensitive data is stored on the BoxesApp
server (with the exception of address for orders). BoxesApp does not process
any payments. All personal customer data is stored by Shopify and Recharge.
Nightly cron jobs are run and backup data files are emailed in json format to
the admin. A weekly cron job removes boxes, orders, and logs older than 2 weeks
(Shopify and Recharge both maintain all historic order and subscription data
and boxes and logs created in BoxesApp remain available in json formatted
backup files).
With the release of Shopify's subscription api a number of third party apps
have been created to work with the api. In particular Recharge Payments has an
extensive api and webhooks to which I could integrate my BoxesApp. So, this
past winter (2022) I have extensively remodelled BoxesApp to include some
missing features (especially more error catching and logging) and integrate
subscriptions directly with Recharge and Shopify (as can be seen in the client
side screenshot at the top of this page). I managed to complete and release
this in early September 2022, it is now December and it seems that the app is
working well with around 30 Recharge subscriptions and a current average of
close to 200 boxes per week. I also continue to run the old subscriptions as a
separate app until such a time as Streamside can migrate their old
subscriptions to use the Recharge/Shopify integration.
My timekeeping over that last couple of years has been sparse and I can only
give a rough estimate of the time spent coding the BoxesApp to be well over
1000 hours (by using the command line utility `last` and making some fair
assumptions). My server costs me NZD$40 per month and I have recently invoiced
Streamside for 12 months at NZD$75 per month. I'm a lousy capitalist. However,
what if there were 10 store owners using the app, or 100? But I do not want to
be the person taking the app to that level. As indicated above I've sworn that
I have had enough of coding for this life and my "wants" are minimal.
Marketing the app to more store owners would take someone with a skill set that
I lack. I struggle with the anxiety of knowing it is being used by one store
owner and 200 customers - I reckon I'd fall apart if it were 10 stores and 2000
customers. For example, I honestly don't know how much load my current setup
could handle in order to figure out what level of resources would be required
as more app instances were added. As the app stands, installation requires a
fair bit of manual setup which makes a trial install out of the question. The
documentation requires more work. The code itself would not stand up to
industry standards; I have made efforts with eslint and jsdoc from time to time
but mostly I've been pushing for results and lacked the time to follow through.
Similarly there is very little in the way of automated testing. Even with my
poor ability to estimate coding time I can see that these three would entail a
further investment of ... let me just say, countless ... hours.
I maintain a list of features and improvements that didn't get into the current
version that I hope to be able to complete next winter (i.e. winter 2023). In
the meantime I'm working on documentation. I will publish this document when
the documentation is more complete.
A bunch of work done in the winter 2023.
A bunch of work done in early 2024. The change log is still being written.
Published December 20 2022.
Updating February 2024
![[image: BoxesApp log]](https://cousinsd.net/boxes-dark.png){kind=link}
![[image: BoxesApp client facing interface]](https://cousinsd.net/screenshot-client.png){kind=link}
![[image: Subscriptions]](https://cousinse.net/subscription.png){kind=link}