Add a shopping cart to any website using Snipcart!

Snipcart utilizes Azure’s open source capabilities, working with Quartz, Postal and Javascript, to provide the most efficient and flexible e-commerce solution available.

Snipcart is making web design and development easier with their new, flexible e-commerce solution. Designed for developers and merchants, Snipcart empowers businesses to quickly turn any website into a scalable, customizable e-commerce platform by providing simple integration with any technology or system. Just after being featured on the front page of startups stepping stone Product Hunt, the Québec-based team will be flying to Ireland to participate in the famous PITCH competition at this year’s Web Summit in Dublin.

Behind Snipcart’s inception lays a simple founding principle: Separating CMS from e-commerce. Co-founder & product manager Georges Saad puts it this way: “We’re in a best-of-breed model. You shouldn’t have to choose a CMS because of its e-commerce plugins. And you shouldn’t have to build your whole site inside a closed ecosystem just because you want to sell online. We believe in giving developers the freedom to use the right tools for the right job; that’s it.”

The whole Snipcart team on top of their Quebec City office's rooftop.

More than a simple cart, Snipcart also provides a full back-office management dashboard to track sales, orders, customers, and more - all while connecting with CRMs, inventory management systems & email marketing solutions. Users can integrate Snipcart with external systems and platforms using their advanced APIs & webhooks, enabling enhanced e-commerce platforms. Snipcart empowers businesses to integrate with inventory management systems, email marketing platforms, and much more.

A BizSpark member, Snipcart leverages Microsoft’s Azure and SQL Server technologies to enhance the quality and usability of their product. Built on the Azure platform, Snipcart employs ASP.NET Web API, EntityFramework, and ASP.NET MVC to augment their .NET Framework. This allows Snipcart to provide the user with capabilities for building high-quality apps including automatic memory management and support for modern programming languages, while eliminating the need for most of the data-access code that developers must usually write.

According to co-founder and lead developer Charles Ouellet, the Azure platform has allowed Snipcart to provide a simple transitional solution for the e-commerce industry. “Our solution consists of a web application which can be scaled automatically through Azure, a worker in a cloud service that processes events asynchronously via Azure Event Hubs and also does some recurring job using Quartz as task scheduler. We also use Blob Storage to service our assets through a CDN. And the SQL Azure database has been a savior for us. Azure has really enabled us to provide our customers with a more effective and affordable e-commerce solution.”

Azure’s advancement in the field of open source software capabilities cemented Snipcart’s decision to utilize the technology says Charles. “We are using a lot of Windows open source software such as Quartz, Postal, and ASP.NET stack, which is open source as well. We are also using Javascript open source technologies like Backbone, Marionette, Moment, Gulp, and Webpack. With our platform, it was difficult to find a technology that could handle such a diverse set of open source technologies. Azure provided us the solution.”

Looking to easily add customizable layer of e-commerce on any website? Check out Microsoft Bizspark member Snipcart.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Microsoft is helping these startups succeed through its BizSpark program. To join or see other startup stories, visit us at our website here. To listen to our startups, check out these podcasts on devradio here. 

About BizSpark: Microsoft BizSpark is a global program that helps startups succeed by giving free access to Microsoft Azure cloud services, software and support. BizSpark members receive up to $750 per month of free Microsoft Azure cloud services for 3 years: that’s $150 per month each for up to 5 developers. Azure works with Linux and open-source technologies such as Ruby, Python, Java and PHP. BizSpark is available to startups that are privately held, less than 5-years-old and earn less than $1M in annual revenue.