Neto

​Neto hosts its first Open Night!

Rob Marchant
· 3 min read

This week we threw our office doors wide open for our very first Neto Open Night, giving customers the opportunity to learn more about our vision, the way we work behind the scenes, and to chat to a wide range of people within the company.

The evening started with a presentation from our CEO Ryan, who revealed some key pricing updates related to the recent subscription change, due to be announced to our entire customer base shortly. He discussed a shift of company focus, to concentrate on improving the four key pillars that every ecommerce business needs to succeed:

  1. Buy it—covering every aspect of purchasing from suppliers
  2. Stock it—fortifying inventory and warehousing needs
  3. Sell it—allowing merchants to sell products in as many channels as possible, as effectively as possible
  4. Ship it—focusing on improving the fulfilment process

This reflects a renewed focus on the core platform itself, enhancing the great features that we already have. With this in mind, there’s a few crucial inventory features in the pipeline:

On the payment side, Stripe has become our key focus, as it has an incredible range of features including checkout enhancements, popular payment methods such as ApplePay and Google Pay, and state-of-the-art fraud protection.

Next up, Product Manager Lukasz took the stage for a quick preview of our upcoming Stripe payment features—ApplePay and Google Pay—which will dramatically speed up the checkout process for mobile shoppers. Inventory Product Manager Julian followed, demoing the powerful advanced landed costs feature, coming soon.

Our head of engineering Justin took the floor next, and delved into the nebulous world of infrastructure, illustrating the immense complexity behind the Neto platform. With a ton of work from the technology team, since changing platform providers in 2016 we’ve been able to reduce the time that it takes to deploy changes to the software from 4-6 weeks, to just three and a half hours. The deployment process was also made much simpler, allowing a wider range of engineers to complete the process, rather than just a select few.

Another great addition to the Neto software was the development of feature toggles, which allow us to push features to the live production environment, but have them hidden until a Product Manager decides that the time is right for public release.

Our head honcho of security Lochie closed the presentation part of the evening, opening by declaring security matters to be fairly dull, but then proceeding to make them engaging and amusing. Must be something to do with his winning smile? He stressed the overall importance of security and data protection, covering various types of malicious attacks, to help our customers understand what their businesses are exposed to.

The latter half of the evening was an opportunity for our customers to chat to key players from the various teams in our business, each with their own table:

Inventory proved to be immensely popular, with Jules demoing the new barcode scanning feature for quickly receiving purchase orders. Given that many of our attending customers were processing overseas orders which included complex landed costs, there was also a lot of interest in the upcoming advanced landed costs feature.

Rarely do customers get the opportunity to talk to the behind-the-scenes engineers in our business, but were spoilt for choice for this part of the evening, having more than enough time to pick their logical brains. The Partner team were also able to offer some insight into our webstore themes, helping customers to understand them a little better. Overall, the meet and greet section of the evening was a great chance for customers to chat to the real people behind Neto, putting names to faces, and getting to know each other better.

We’d like to thank everyone who attended our first Open Night—it was great to meet so many of our customers in person, and we can’t wait for the next one!