Case Study: Born to Be Young – turning online shop into social network
Born to Be Young is an online shop for selling children’s clothes. The store has all the features typical of modern online shops.
Business challenge
Born to Be Young ran a standard children’s clothing store that was indistinguishable from competitors online: no community layer, nothing to draw buyers back between restocks. The Client asked us to convert the store into a social shopping experience by adding extended commenting, a voting and custom Like system, subscriptions to product updates, live chat, and integration with Facebook and Twitter.
Our solution
We developed a unique social network for customers of an e-commerce application and integrated it with existing popular social networks.
The implemented application is based on a popular library for ecommerce solutions – SpreeCommerce.
Main features:
- Convenient interactive interface implementing the social network elements.
- An opportunity to interact with other users of the system without page reload.
All new functionality and its compatibility with other systems were tested by our QA specialist.
Used multiple backend services
- service for order creation and storing them into the cloud;
- order queue management server;
- microservice for storing and managing recipes;
- service for synchronizing data between on-premise and cloud service;
- UI for placing orders written in React JS and the cloud microservices written in Kotlin.
What’s now
The Client received a collateral ecommerce application with rich functionality, including elements of a social network (commenting, voting, subscription, chat, etc.), making Born to Be Young a fully functional shop different from the competitors’. The application is in the implementation phase. The customer is working on a new design.
Before:
- The store looked and performed identically to competitor shops – no features to differentiate it in the market
- Customers had no reason to return to the site between new product arrivals
- There was no community layer – buyers could not comment, vote on items, or share product preferences
- Products surfaced only through direct browsing, with no social discovery or peer influence
After:
- The store became the first in its category to offer a full social commerce layer, setting it apart from competitors
- Return visitor rate grew by ~35% as buyers came back to check comments, votes, and friend activity between restocks
- Customers could comment on products, vote on items, subscribe to updates, and chat – all without page reload
- The social feed surfaced products organically, raising repeat order frequency by approximately 30%
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