Overview

Download Youth Ministry is an E-Commerce website that takes in product submissions from youth workers, edits them for distribution, then sells them to other youth workers. The author makes a percentage of the sales, which helps provide a passive income for many of our authors. We release dozens of resources a week. DYM also has a pretty incredible membership program that offers store credit, discounts in the store, and access to some pretty neat tools for youth workers (like Sidekick).

Behind the Scenes

Download Youth Ministry has been through some drastic iterations. I was part of the original MVP, when it was built on WooCommerce and Wordpress. I got to build the author dashboard, which helped authors know how well their resources were helping other youth workers. We also launched the membership program back on Wordpress.

DYM's site then went through a phase in Magento, which I had pretty minimal involvement in. At the time I was focused on Newsletter, DYM Games, Leader Training Library, Sidekick, and our Pipeline app.

In 2020 we rebuilt the entire site in SalesForce Commerce Cloud.

Involvement

My involvement started with only getting the API to work with our membership apps. After launch we had significant issues with what we were handed by our systems integrator and my role changed to diagnosing and fixing things that were poorly written. I mainly handled helping our new SI with troubleshooting and acting as a translator for the team, but also solved a few tickets as well.

I had to quickly learn how about SalesForce and our integrations, then train our team on best practices. I wrote SOPs, documented data flows, recorded video tutorials, lead trainings and QA team members' work.

Because our site was in such disarray, I helped diagnose, documented, and QA issues with bad data, broken features, and bugs so we could get the website fully operational. Being the only developer, I handled all content that wasn't capable with the built-in drag-n-drop components, managed credentials and security practices and helped our team find the best way to export data.

Later I got to take a class on SFRA and got to work with our SI to write some features, fix bugs, and write custom drag-n-drop components for our marketing team to use.