Saleor's composable, open-source e-commerce platform helps brands scale their multi-market reach. Here's how they do support.

Why we love Saleor 

Saleor is a composable, open-source e-commerce platform with API-first design and a tech-agnostic stack. The company offers developer-friendly tools for innovative brands that scale their multi-market reach. Global brands like Lush, Breitling, and Rough Trade rely on Saleor as their eCommerce platform of choice to match their flexibility, reliability, and scalability needs.

How the Saleor team works

At Saleor, direct communication with developers is as important as any part of the product. Recognizing the crucial role that developers play in issue resolution and platform customization, Saleor gives a lot of attention to ensuring communication between engineers and their end customers is easy and fast. A dedicated Slack channel is included in all ‘Pro’ and ‘Enterprise’ plans to ensure that customers have an open line of communication with Saleor’s support team. The team is primarily made up of support engineers and delivery team members that provide onboarding support.

How Saleor uses Plain

As Saleor continued to scale, maintaining fast response times with customers across multiple Slack channels was becoming increasingly difficult - it became more and more important to separate support-related Slack messages from day-to-day conversations in customer channels in order to prioritize urgent customer questions. That’s what led Saleor to search for a dedicated support tool to manage Slack channels. 

Before adopting Plain, Saleor was using another Slack- based support tool. Although it worked at first, it wasn’t developer friendly enough for the team, making it hard to integrate with other developer tools or share code with customers. The friction resulted in the team slowly reverting back to Slack to respond to customers, which left them with the problem still unsolved. Ultimately, this was why Saleor looked for a different Slack-based support tool and decided to switch to Plain. 

Pioneers with Plain’s Slack integration and beyond 

Saleor was one of the first customers to use Plain’s Slack integration and adopted Plain before the integration was publicly released, which required a leap of faith from the Saleor team to trust a newer tool. 

“For being the first customer to use Plain’s Slack integration, the experience was really seamless and impressive. It’s a testament to the quality of the product in general,” said Magdalena Kobylanska, Saleor’s Support Team Lead.  

Subtle features such as the ability to include emojis in a response, see emoji reactions on a thread, send messages with syntax highlighting, or mention a Slack user directly from Plain made support easier than ever and allowed everyone to work from Plain without having to switch back and forth to Slack.

As one of Plain’s earliest adopters of Slack, Saleor also worked closely with Plain’s team to ensure that how the Slack integration worked fit the team’s needs.

For example, the initial beta release of Plain’s Slack integration only allowed automated ingestion of Slack threads. This didn’t work for Saleor’s use case as they needed to filter out a high volume of non-support related chit chat in customer channels. 

In less than a week, Plain shipped multiple ingestion modes, including a manual ingestion, in order to support Saleor’s needs. 

“I really appreciate that the Plain team is there for us. I know this is a privilege and in terms of support, the fact that I can ask the source directly is so important to us.”

Making support less stressful

By switching to Plain, Saleor removed a ton of small friction points which were previously getting in the way of fast and efficient team collaboration. Their tooling now gets out of the way and lets them focus on providing great support.

“It’s a lot of little things that add up to show the quality of the platform. Support can already be stressful and if our support tool removes stress, it’s the best investment we can make for ourselves and to provide better support for our customers.” 

Workspace-wide Slack notifications allow the support team to collaborate with developers without needing them to switch away from Slack, sound effects give a small sense of accomplishment when a thread is closed, and the Linear integration makes logging bug reports and feature requests seamless.

“The Linear integration is so smooth - it’s exactly what we needed. I was expecting so much more manual work to create tickets for the engineering team but Plain removed all the manual work and allows for really swift communication with customers.”

What the future of support looks like at Saleor

Looking ahead, Saleor is preparing for scale - this means investing in processes that add stability and predictability to support and increasing collaboration between support and product teams to keep everyone in the company aware of and engaged in customer feedback. 

Saleor is deepening their use of Plain’s API in preparation for this shift. This means adding customer cards and events to bring even more context into Plain from Saleor’s systems.

The goal is to make sure that every support request provides the full context of the customer and issue to keep the workflow smooth and fast.

“I really like Plain’s product. I like the quality, and I like the way you build the product. As a product owner myself, I really appreciate that.”