Ben Parsell.
All experience

Experience · Past role

SpiceJungle

Software Development Intern.

Software Development Intern

I helped a D2C e-commerce team extend and innovate on Magento — turning manual, error-prone processes into dashboards that just work.

SpiceJungle is a direct-to-consumer online spice and baking ingredient merchant (Beanilla) based out of Rockford, MI. As an entry into a full-time software development role, I was able to join the SpiceJungle team in the summer of 2016 as a Software Development Intern, focusing my time on their Magento 1.0 build.

While not my main focus, I was able to extend portions of the SpiceJungle and Beanilla templates, including page indexing for Yotpo reviews prior to their availability to do so (i.e. index n+1 product reviews to be included in search results for Google, Bing, etc.). My primary focus that summer was working on an issue inherent to Magento, which was recognizing a cost-basis for a given product in a manageable fashion. Given the volatility of spices and vanilla bean prices, we had a need to quickly recognize costs based on update vendor price sheets. Using Laravel and the Magento 1.0 SOAP API, I was able to build a dedicated dashboard for business users to quickly upload vendor price lists, recognize product margins as a gain or loss as a percentage, and quickly update those Magento prices via the API.

01

Vendor Pricing Dashboard

Built a Laravel-based dashboard that let business users upload vendor price sheets and automatically recalculate product margins via the Magento 1.0 SOAP API — turning a manual, spreadsheet-driven process into a few clicks.

02

Review Indexing for SEO

Extended the SpiceJungle and Beanilla Magento templates to index product reviews (via Yotpo) for search engines ahead of Yotpo's own native support — giving an early SEO boost on Google and Bing search results.

03

Margin Tracking at Scale

Solved a core Magento limitation around cost-basis tracking for highly volatile commodities (spices, vanilla beans), enabling the team to see real-time gain/loss percentages as vendor costs shifted.

Magento 1.0LaravelSOAP APIEcommerceDTC RetailPricing & MarginsSEO / Page Indexing