GetOutfitted uses Git to manage their Shopify store

GetOutfitted rents ski and snowboard apparel and gear by shipping it directly to their customers’ hotel, condo, or resort rooms. Making life easier for their customers, starts with the storefront. Spencer Norman, the VP of Engineering at GetOutfitted, had this to say about their storefront, We use the Shopify platform to rent our gear, and have done some significant development on our custom theme so we can help our customers have a great experience before, during, and after their rental.

One of the major challenges that we ran into during this process, was finding a clean and systematic way to deploy changes to either staging or production.

Beyond what their customers see, the team at GetOutfitted invested lots of time creating a development process to make it easier to develop and use the code they were building with their Shopify store. They wanted more control over file organization for their team, as they worked through the early stages of developing new features or fixing bugs, and needed to be able to compile the code they created, into the assets required for Shopify’s structure. Spencer says, One of the major challenges that we ran into during this process, was finding a clean and systematic way to deploy changes to either staging or production. We couldn’t just hook up a 1-to-1 FTP link or use the Shopify Theme Tool because we had to compile our assets.

To get the kind of control they wanted, Spencer and his team began to use Git to manage local development. Solving their problem with Git locally, created a new problem when they were ready to deploy their work. Shopify doesn’t support deployment via Git, so we’ve been using a combination of tools and Shopify’s web based theme editor to deploy our updates. Needless to say, this has been inefficient and error-prone.

The Beanstalk + Shopify integration has completely solved the organization and deployment problems we had.

The team at GetOutfitted was looking for a solution since they started in October 2014, and were on the verge of creating their own tool, when Beanstalk contacted them to see if they’d like to participate in the beta for a new Shopify integration they were building.

The Beanstalk + Shopify integration has completely solved the organization and deployment problems we had. Now we can use Git deploy for our Shopify themes, to either a staging or live production environment. This has saved us a number of hours every week, reduces errors that were cropping up with the hacked together deploy methods we were previously using, and makes rolling back much easier when we need to.

December 30th, 2014