In order to sustain in the competitive market of online selling, e-commerce portals had to constantly adapt and evolve. For our e-commerce portal to stand the test of time, we needed to make our portal flexible and scalable enough to facilitate future changes. However the most difficult challenge was to create a modular website design and user interface that is attractive, modern, fast, and user friendly, and can be changed according to need easily.

Keeping the need for change and moder design in mind, we choose AngularJS as our primary front end design framework. Our front-end was of modern design with intuitive UI, attractive animations, latest design features, and most importantly was optimal for viewing in all devices.The biggest achievement in this step was our modular design. We divided all our components into independent modules that interacted with well thought out API sets. This gave our whole architecture flexibility to adapt. For changing any feature of the e-commerce portal we would just have to update the related modules, and then just reconnect them back to the main system. This allowed us to implement many features very efficiently including full-text-search features, price comparison modules, product cart and price calculation modules etc.

One of the USP of e-commerce portal was its large product base. The portal had to maintain millions of products and it’s information, and that information had to stored in a smart way to facilitate search. However the biggest challenge for the client was to actually update and upload product information of these million products in the system.

Our client received the product information in the form of excel or csv sheets from various sellers on a regular interval. Therefore the most efficient way to update the product information was to create a solution that allowed the admin to upload the excel file and update the data in the e-commerce portal database. We created a custom java based solution to do just that. The product information was stored as documents and collections in a separate MongoDB database. Using MongoDB increased the performance of the portal in fetching and displaying product information when user requests product searches or requests for detailed product descriptions. Our solution was smart enough to automatically update the information of products that were being added for the first time, alert the admin about any change on any value in any existing product, and notify the admin if any product was not present in the latest product list excel. The admin had the ability to chose whether they want to update the new information or keep the old one.

As said earlier, the e-commerce portal has to adapt based on its performance. But how to track that performance? The client needed a way to track all user action, and create intelligent reports of all activity done on the website.

We designed our system in such a way that can keep logs of every important user and administrator activity. Every critical user action, every important data commit, and every action on an order, was maintained on carefully planned database tables. The client could decided what they wanted to track and what not. We improved our user levels and created multiple hierarchies of administrators. This allowed us to provide each type of admin user different level of reports. Admins can generate ad-hoc reports through a special tab in their admin dashboard. In addition we created a system that sent regular standard reports to pre-set email ids. The client had the ability to alter report frequency and email ids. We also provided advanced filters to these reports that allowed the admins to gather smart reports out of data.