The problem

For years, Underwaterpistol has been building exceptional digital experiences for their Shopify clients. But as their agency grew and projects became more complex, they found themselves dealing with an increasingly frustrating challenge: the burden of DevOps was taking valuable time away from actual development work.

"We're a Shopify agency," explained Dan Arrowsmith, Technical Lead at Underwaterpistol. "We shouldn't need to hire specialized developers to run infrastructure for us and worry about if stuff goes down. That’s what our clients pay us to do."

The team had previously relied on complex AWS setups involving Cloud Functions, DynamoDB databases, and custom server configurations for their client projects. Project upkeep was piling up over the months, with hundreds of hours spent on infrastructure setup and maintenance — time that could have been spent building the features that directly benefited their clients. 

Projects were becoming expensive, and maintaining everything left the Underwaterpistol developers with less time to work on any new requests.

The team realized they needed to step back and reevaluate their approach. They were spending too much time in AWS consoles, setting up servers, and managing functions – as Dan shared, all the "boring stuff that nobody really likes to do."

The situation became particularly pressing when Reach PLC, a major UK media conglomerate that owns roughly a third of the lifestyle magazine and tabloid market, approached them to build a complex marketplace integration for their new e-commerce platform, Yimbly.com. The project required sophisticated product mapping between two very different data structures, and the team knew their current approach to infrastructure would make the project unnecessarily complex and time-consuming.

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The solution

After evaluating several options, including a few iPaaS solutions that proved too limiting, Underwaterpistol remembered a demo they'd seen of Gadget. The platform promised to eliminate their DevOps overhead while still providing the flexibility they needed for complex client projects.

Gadget's built-in Shopify connection immediately proved valuable for the Reach PLC marketplace project. The development platform automatically handled all the Shopify integration complexities like OAuth and webhook subscriptions, allowing the team to focus on solving the complex business logic of mapping products between the marketplace and Shopify's data structures.

"Gadget does all the Shopify stuff for you. It's instantly there, which means my developers don't have to worry about it," Dan explained. This meant the team could concentrate on solving challenging problems like managing products with multiple sellers (similar to Amazon) and mapping them to Shopify's variant structure.

The team leveraged Gadget's built-in database and real-time event capabilities to store marketplace products and seamlessly sync them with Shopify. They created a sophisticated system where seller information became the first variant option, with sub-variant options like color and size. This allowed customers to potentially order the same product from different sellers, with the system automatically handling the complex order splitting on the backend.

When they needed to add custom shipping functionality to handle different shipping options from various sellers, Gadget's framework made it simple to implement. "That was super simple to set up because it's already connected to Shopify, it's already got the route there. I literally just take a few minutes to write a function to do it and it’s handled," Dan noted.

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The results

Building with Gadget has transformed how the team at Underwaterpistol approaches custom development projects. The Reach PLC marketplace integration, which would have taken well over 400 hours to build using their previous AWS-based approach, was completed in just over 200 hours with Gadget.

But the time savings extend beyond the initial build. The team now has instant access to comprehensive logging and debugging tools, making it simple to troubleshoot issues. Instead of spending hours diving into customer issues, they’re able to quickly identify and resolve them as they arise. "If an order doesn’t go through for any reason for example, all I have to do is go into Gadget and I can quickly search all the logs for the past day. It just brings everything up straight away," Dan explained.

The auto-generated API documentation has also streamlined their QA process. Instead of having to create extensive technical documentation, they can simply hand off Gadget's automatically generated documentation to their QA team.

The success of the Reach PLC project has led Underwaterpistol to standardize on Gadget for all their custom development work. They've already moved several existing projects to the platform without trouble, with one of those migrations taking just a day to complete. The team is now working on three different client projects in Gadget and is developing their own public Shopify app for importing metafield definitions between multi-store setups.

"We love it so much now that I've moved all our apps onto Gadget," Dan shared. "It just doesn’t make sense not to." Since moving their other projects to Gadget, the platform has allowed them to be more responsive to client requests and quickly add new features — without worrying about infrastructure scaling or maintenance.

For Underwaterpistol, Gadget has eliminated the complex and expensive DevOps overhead that was slowing them down, allowing them to focus on what they do best: building innovative solutions for their clients. The development platform has become an essential part of their technology stack, enabling them to take on more complex projects while keeping development efficient and manageable.