I have been a part of WholesaleBox for five years, a platform that facilitates wholesale transactions between manufacturers or large wholesalers and retailers in India. I played a role in the early stages of product development, including ideation, design, wireframing, and technology selection.

• Design across web, mobile, and tools used internally
• Platform architecture
• Database design
• Web development
• Build deployment pipelines
• Analytics and optimization

After much debate, we decided to use Opencart ecommerce, an open-source eCommerce script, to build our website. Our primary concern was being able to release a minimum viable product within a month, and we felt that Opencart would be easy to customize and that we would be able to find affordable talent to work on it.

Below are some other tools I have worked with in Wholesalebox:

• Mobile application
• Tailored CRM solution
• Recommendation engine
• Hybrid mobile application for pickup and packaging for operation team
• Seller panel 
• Auto creation of white label website for sellers
• Algorithm for auto approval for a credit limit
• Integration of various third-party API’s like marketing automation tool, support ticketing, and chatbot

Challange 1

After few months as number of products increases, the search started performing slow.

Solution

In an eCommerce store, the search feature is heavily relied upon, providing fast search results can boost engagement and conversions. Opencart previously relied on using the “like” operator to search for relevant items in the database based on a search term. We have now improved the system by implementing database table indexing and utilizing Apache Solr to store searchable information of product data.

Challange 2

The website performed well in the first year, but subsequently began to experience slow performance and occasional crashes during high traffic periods.

Solution

• We analyzed the performance of frequently visited pages, made code adjustments based on the results
• Identified and improved slow database queries. Used ELK setup to identify the slow queries.
•  Implemented a master-slave setup for MySQL to distribute database load
• Employed a load balancer for web servers
• Utilized RabbitMQ for handling non-critical tasks in the background

Technology stacks

• PHP, Opencart, Laravel
• MySql, MongoDB
• ReactJS
• Apache Solr
• RabbitMQ and later AWS SQS
• ReactNative

VC 

fundraise