About Onboard Brands
Onboard Brands is a due diligence platform for assessing potential suppliers and making sure their ethical, environmental, and social practices align with the values of retailers who wish to work with them. The company was established by the co-founders of Akojo Market, an eCommerce platform for artisan makers in emerging markets. They wanted to onboard brands as quickly as possible and with complete visibility of their supply chains.
Onboard Brands came to us wanting to build a bespoke platform specifically aimed at their retailers to ensure that they had complete visibility of the brands that they partner with, making it easier for them to monitor compliance, streamline due diligence, and reassure those retailers that the brands they are working with are sustainable and follow ethical practices.
Technologies Used
We built the entire platform from scratch using React.js for the frontend and Laravel for the backend development. React.js facilitates building user-friendly interfaces and powers the platform with fast rendering capabilities. Laravel powered the project with various handy features and high scalability with smooth performance.
Services we offered
We tailored a bespoke platform that allows retailers to easily onboard brands. Based on their demand, we built a technology stack that would empower the platform for high performance and scalability.
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Frontend Development
We used React.js, a popular JavaScript library for building easy-to-use user interfaces. It can update only the parts of a page that need to be changed, which improves loading times. This powers the retailers with high speed performance of the brand based platform.
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Backend Development
Our expert Laravel developers built a secure code for the online platform. Its variety of pre-built components and libraries powered the project with faster development cycles. The handy features of this PHP framework enabled us to deliver the project with exceptional scalability.
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Form Builder
We built a form builder that helps retailers create a mix of questionnaire types for their brands to answer. This was done to help retailers make well-informed decisions before connecting with any particular brand. Retailers can add several questions to the form as per the business needs.
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Technical Integration for Onboard Brands
Their online platform enabled retailers to choose specific brands and partner with them for selling their products and services. The platform was integrated with verification APIs which were capable of accessing data published by governments, NGOs and also official corporate registries. These were crucial in ensuring that the information given during the onboarding process is honest and valid.
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Online platform development
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Bespoke designs
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API integration
Our Process
We performed in-depth research to analyse their ideas and how to transform them into a digital platform. We realised that the growing businesses needed a scalable platform as more retailers and brands would join to collaborate for smooth partnerships. This helped us choose a suitable technology stack for building the platform.
Requirements
Onboard Brands came to us to build a unique platform aimed at helping their retailers. The vision was to ensure that their retailers have 100% visibility of the brands they select to partner with. This would help them with smooth monitoring of compliances and streamline due diligence. It will also enable them to analyse that the brands they are working with are sustainable and implement ethical practices. The system is designed to be a proof point rather than a comprehensive supply chain auditor to use on a business’s own integrated supply chain.
Solutions
Our recommendation was to treat this as a Greenfield Project and to design and build the platform using React.js for the client side and Laravel for the server side. One of the key features we built was a form builder that each retailer uses to create different questionnaire types for their brands to answer in order for them to be accepted to sell their products online. The questionnaire builder provides a question bank from which the retailer can add questions, and a freeform question creation functionality, so the retailers have the flexibility to completely customise their own questionnaire.
Results
The platform provides an easy-to-use and interactive onboarding portal for users to assess the practices of potential suppliers. Retailers can onboard brands from start to finish, from completing a questionnaire, signing and returning documentation, and collecting badges to accessing support through a built-in ChatBot and receiving feedback on their questionnaire answers. Answers are verified in real-time against globally recognised compliance and ethics databases, whilst discrepancies and red flags appear as notifications, and retailers can approve or reject brands via the tool.
