Namshi Engineering

One of the biggest challenges for e-commerce portals is to be able to deliver the same, or even a better, kind of experience physical retailers offer in terms of size exchanges. When you want to return a jacket at the Zara store next door, you simply walk to the store, ask for a larger size, and swap your return with the new, larger jacket — in case that size is out of stock you will immediately be refunded. In any case, it’s instant gratification.

We recently launched a new feature which we internally call “delivery promises”. This feature informs our users the expected delivery lead time of individual products, based on their location. Users select their location from a drop down list and a timer counts down to the next available delivery dispatch time. This allows users to know how much time they have to place an order to receive their item at the next earliest possible delivery date.

When running a business, being able to compare metrics to other time period helps to understand which way things are moving and take actions based on that. For example, a sudden decrease in conversion rate is something you would definitely want to monitor, and take action based on.

Love penetration testing, DefCon, bug bounty programs and scrapping through lines of code to find vulnerabilities? Then we might have the right opening for you!

Love microservices, NodeJS and distributed systems? Then we might have the right opening for you!

Namshi believes that working with skilled security researchers across the globe is crucial in identifying weaknesses in any technology — with that in mind, I wanted to introduce our (currently private) Bug Bounty Program that’s been in place since a couple years.

Recently, the Namshi iOS app went through a UI overhaul which includes a new font, improved UX on a few screens and some attractive animations. Customers loved it, the team enjoyed working on it and, best of all, conversion rate increased. To achieve this, we relied on a few open source libraries available through Cocoapods.

Some of the available open source UI components are very well written and while working with these, you will get a lot of inspiration. I won’t hesitate to mention SkyFloatinglabelTextField from SkyScanner and XLPagerTabStrip here. Sometimes, the UI requirements are very specific and UI libraries will not support the particular use-case you have. While working on the UI improvement for Namshi iOS app, we faced the same situation where we had to modify an existing library to tweak its looks.

Here at Namshi we have quite a bit of a diverse team but, like many companies out there, struggle with the gender gap in tech.

We, though, would like to share the story and advices from the women who are part of our team, with the hope that they’ll inspire others to join us, or to simply give computer science, or programming in general, a go.

Love React, React Native, the dom and webperf? Then we might have the right opening for you!

Around this time last year, we decided to try running subset of our customer-facing web traffic on spot instances.
This decision was solely based to reduce our AWS instance bill. We’ve heard of people running workloads on spot instances but most of the workloads are usually long-running jobs where you don’t mind if the instance gets terminated at any time. Running customer-facing apps is a completely different challenge where we can’t afford any downtime of any sort.