Elastic Path empowered us to explore new revenue opportunities with their simple, yet flexible commerce platform. We were able to design and launch a self-service experience of complex professional services with little overhead. With Elastic Path, we could focus on scaling, future-proofing, and ultimately providing the experience we wanted for our customers.
Who They Are
Paro is a growth platform bringing businesses and expert finance and accounting professionals together through AI technology and acute industry knowledge. Paro’s community of professionals provides a range of services to clients, from bookkeeping and accounting to highly specialized corporate development and strategic advisory.
eCommerce Solutions Built for Tech and Business Users
We sat down with Kody Myers, Director of Product, and Amar Bhatia, Senior Product Manager to talk about their eCommerce vision, platform evaluation, implementation, and why they selected Elastic Path to help them achieve their goals
Kody, a startup veteran, talked about Paro’s shift towards a self-service model for freelancers not traditionally seen in the industry. With the adage “fail fast, learn quickly”, Paro initially sought to launch a portal for their freelance experts to self-serve transactions surrounding placement and financial services. The initial launch served as a test towards addressing more complexities within their product offerings as their talent pool and subsequently their menu of services expands.
Paro successfully launched the portal in five months and leveraged Elastic Path technology partners, Algolia for search functionality and Stripe for payment processing.
Kody’s biggest criteria when evaluating a commerce platform was the ease of use given the limited resources of his Engineering team. He sought out a solution and partner who could give time back to both technical and business teams to focus on scaling the business (i.e. development opps and client building respectively).
Startups move quickly and pivot as needed with sometimes little to no runway. Kody pointed to the API-first, headless architecture as crucial to the flexibility and agility demanded of Paro’s eCommerce portal, second to ease of implementation and the ability to scale at speed. He refers to himself as a champion of microservices architecture, and believes microservices’ are the future of eCommerce’s fast-paced evolution.
Kody’s response to what he’d tell prospects considering Elastic Path as a partner: lean into the team. Leverage their expertise to solve problems with highly customized solutions designed for where you are right now and where you want to go. One of the most exciting things about working with Elastic Path is the path to the future.
Beyond baseline transactional capabilities, Kody points to the Product Content Management capability which will empower his team to quickly create thousands of variations, support configurable product types and power dynamic bundles, such as service packages.
I’m really excited about exploring the more complex stuff and the opportunity here... I can empower my business and leaders to get creative and create a complex service solution. It’s the culmination of ideas that can really work for us and it could be powerful.Kody Myers, Director of Product
The Power of Product Content Management
The features of Product Content Management, specifically around increased ease and speed of variation creation is what also excites Amar Bhatia, Senior Product Manager, and his team about the future. This new capability will significantly impact Paro’s ability to scale their products and services without additional lift to their existing teams. What lies ahead for Paro is a focus on conversion and the growth of services afforded by Product Content Management.
Making Time for Scale
Amar further reflected on what impresses him about the capabilities of Elastic Path Commerce Cloud. Echoing the impact on the Engineering team’s time, Amar appreciates the ability for non-tech users to make changes as needed, without involving the tech team. In Paro’s case, their non-tech user is an Operations team member who interacts with freelancers daily on their application experience to ensure their needs are met and exceeded when using the portal.
Today’s Tech for the Changing Face of Today’s Freelance Professional
What differentiates Paro in the professional services industry is a passion to put power back into the hands of the freelance professional; all too often big consulting firms attract top talent for project work with immense gains for the client, leaving the contracted professional behind with far less control over their day-to-day, much less their trajectory. Paro empowers businesses and professionals to pursue meaningful work on their own terms and go beyond their biggest goals
Continue your eCommerce education
Discover Composable Commerce
Composable Commerce is the modern approach by which eCommerce teams are empowered to select and assemble various “best of breed” commerce solutions and compose them to satisfy their exact business requirements.
Join industry experts, featured speaker Mike Lowndes, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner and Sal Visca, CTO at Elastic Path, as they talk about the concepts behind Composable Commerce and how you can leverage the approach to build a commerce strategy.
Learn how to take back control of your digital commerce strategy in this 10-part miniseries which introduces a new approach advocated by Gartner for how to build modern commerce experiences, called Composable Commerce.