Dreamvention's Journey to Success in the OpenCart Development Community

If you’ve been using OpenCart for a while, then there's probably no need to introduce who Dreamvention are.

Today, we will tell you some curious details about them.

After collaborating with one of the best development teams in the OpenCart community, we got our hands on tons of info about them.

Actually, enough to deliver the story of how they became such a big influence on the OpenCart marketplace and how they enabled thousands of stores to succeed in increasing their sales.

We will let them speak for themselves…

Enjoy!

 

When did you start developing for OpenCart?

Dreamvention is a company of friends. Literally. It’s co-founders, Arsen and I, Dmitriy, met years before the official 13 of January 2011 birthday of the company. The day when we opened our office. It was somewhere in December of 2016 that we decided to create a company. We rented a small office in a production facility that could fit only 4 people.

I (Dmitriy, developer) was working for an international consulting company and Arsen (designer) was working for one of the leading banks in Ukraine. After work and many times during sleepless nights we would do our projects over Skype.

Before we opened an office we already had done several freelance products. We tried everything: Joomla, WordPress, Magento, Drupal and couple of projects on OpenCart. Back in the days it was probably the youngest of all CMSs and it just showed up on our radar with a 1.4 version.

 


 

What inspired you to begin building OpenCart modules?

OpenCart was very new to us. It’s MVC pattern was interesting and unlike the rest of the CMS, it actually followed it. So, we focused on OpenCart from day one. Eventually we reduced our portfolio to WordPress and OpenCart only.

At some point, we realized that there are a lot of features missing in OpenCart, that are available in other CMS like extra positions. So, we made a small module for that and published it on the OpenCart Marketplace.

It was unbelievable when after 5 days of waiting we got our first sale – $8. It wasn’t the money that excited us but the concept of making products and selling them. We already had done some modules for our clients so we had some basic understanding of the quality needed.

The OpenCart Marketplace is a long-tail of modules and it is growing exponentially. Unfortunately, with the freedom comes the lack of responsibility and many extensions fail to meet the quality requirements. We wanted to be different. iSenseLabs was a great inspiration to us because they also focused on quality. We wanted to make products that we would love to use and this philosophy stayed with us till this day.

 


 

What do you think is the best part about your OpenCart extensions?

Our first big breakthrough was Ajax Quick Checkout. We decided to create a quick checkout because we couldn’t find the one we liked. All of them where lacking the features our clients wanted. It took us time to reach 4000 sales, yet we have thought of AQC as our greatest achievement not only in code, but also in product creation.

We loved the process of making something that people wanted to use so after approximately 2 years of working with clients and projects we shifted our production efforts to product development. We create over 100 extensions such as Visual Designer, Ajax Filter, SEO Module, Blog Module, Social Login and more.

 


 

What do you think lies ahead for OpenCart?

We believe that the future for OpenCart lies in its community. The people around this project are amazing and they are investing their time and energy in creating wonderful products that eventually benefit the whole project.

We decided to play our role too and release our development process, which is built around Shopunity. Shopunity.net is a free service that helps developers manage their extensions with ease, add compatibility to all OpenCart version starting from 2.0.0.0 in one extension repository, manage dependencies like NPM or Composer and deliver the code to its users via an Extension installed directly into OpenCart.

As an example, thanks to Shopunity, we were able to build one of the most complex modules for SEO. We decided to separate the SEO functionality into different extensions all connected via a documented API. So, several developers can work on one project and use Shopunity to combine them all together in one packages, up to date and ready for production. This would have been impossible without Shopunity.

We believe that the easier the process of development and distribution gets, the more people will engage with the project, pushing it to new limits. OpenCart is a wonderful project and we are happy to be part of it.


Dreamvention’s Best Extensions

Dreamvention have created a number of modules that are the go-to solution for OpenCart store owners.

 

AJAX QUICK CHECKOUT

Take control over your OpenCart checkout process and structure its layout so your customers have a smoother and easier shopping experience for an increased conversion rate.


 

VISUAL DESIGNER

Create beautiful and powerful landing pages without any coding skills. They will ease your customers into converting and make use of the traffic that comes through your OpenCart store.


 

AJAX FILTER & SEO LINKS

With this module, you provide a powerful filtering experience with enough filtering types and a balanced design that aligns well with your customer’s expectations.


 

If you would like to contact Dreamvention and share your thoughts and ideas, email them at info@dreamvention.com or join the OpenCart Dev chat at https://gitter.im/opencart-dev/Lobby.

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