Let’s build an eCommerce platform from scratch

Published in

PHP Poets

6 min readDec 13, 2019

Ecommerce is the most widespread & most demanding business these days. The easiest way to buy and sell goods nowadays is mostly done online through an eCommerce platform. It is a never-ending viral loop of a quickly growing platform to provide the physical product available to an end-user or another business entity.

You all be familiar with shopping online from Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, eBay, Ali Express and many others, the working methodologies are the same as they make sure to deliver the product and build trust amongst us. Most of the businesses these days are making there own small or medium scale eCommerce platforms to reach out to more people.

TL: DR;

I am talking about the technical part of building an eCommerce website and app. Before you develop one, you must dive deep inside to understand the business patterns of eCommerce.

For taking the next step towards developing your brand and creating your digital business platform, you need to know about your business. A little time is required to establish an eCommerce business if you have a solid understanding of your brand, trade, or idea.

Brief Knowledge about your business.
Designing and Prototypes
Developing
Testing
Launching

Designing

Designing is all about shaping the ideas to get quality designs out of it. The artboard and web pages are designed in software such as Adobe XD, Sketch for finalizing the prototype. Creating a Database design is an essential part of designing, and we can preferably be understanding the User Flows and ER diagrams for that. You can use FlowMapp or Creately for this purpose. The collab feature in the app helps the UI team to develop the user flows much faster.

The Data Flow Diagrams and Database Notations are used to know some relationships between the entities and get some attributes used in the generation of the structure. The best tool out there is Microsoft Visio.

P.S — The image here created by me to show just a basic flow of an eCommerce platform. Visio 2019 has many tools to simplify it further. If you don’t want Visio, try something else, there are tonnes of websites for that.

Technology Used

You should be precise when choosing a perfect technology for your website and app building.

Native and Cross-Platform application development. You can choose either one.
Choose your dream team wisely for making the workflow smooth and choosing the right tech to work less and do more. Always try to automate things.
PHP framework, Node, Ruby on Rails are reliable and right platforms for creating backend services with REST APIs creation.
Choosing the database can be a tricky one. For any scale, accepting both Relational and No-SQL databases is a great choice.
The load balancer and HTTP accelerators like varnish should be kept in practice to achieve the goal of concurrency and reliability of the application.
The Content Delivery Network, aka CDNs, is popularly used to provide immense availability of the data like images and videos.
These data can be stored or cached and used by Elastic for searching the products in the data.
There is also the need for 3rd party libraries like SMS and Email APIs into the backend for pushing the SMS and email whenever there is some ticket booking or placing an order.
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JQuery are used to build websites.
Magento and WooCommerce are leading eCommerce platforms for creating the website, accelerating your development, and saving time.
Google Analytics does the calculation of sales, user engagement, and user acquisition.

Cost Estimation

The website and app are clinging on the features and designs of your choosing. The app costs somewhere around 10,000 to 15,000 USD for completion and launching. As more and more complexity increases with the selection of a large scale, the price can go beyond $40,000.

Estimate your cost here.

P.S — These prices are Indian prices, which are comparably much lower than the western markets. These prices are only the approximation; The prices may vary.

Scaling

Choose the region to target the audience for providing the services. The larger the region, the larger the scale, the complex the architecture, the more the cost.

Scaling depends on surveys with market analysis, and don’t take a step ahead before knowing about your business and product, which is going to sell. Scaling with collecting extensive data can provide trends and offer predictions.

Developing

The process of development is a tedious job, and one has tied deadlines to achieve completion. Some advanced functionalities are Cart functionality, Push Notifications, Wishlist handling, Membership adding.
Customer Support is also a top feature, for there are always complications working with people. You might not know what breaks or stop working all of a sudden; You must rely on social support for that.

Membership

We have seen the “Big fishes” already been using the Premium Membership plan. The Amazon Prime, Flipkart Plus, PayTm First are some membership plans for the inspiration. The vision is clear, to give premium services at a lower cost and provide offers and attract more people around.

Wishlist and Cart Functionalities

The Wishlist must be there to save the favourites from a large variety of products and view them later. Secure Checkouts and Discounts should provide various payment modes.

Push Notification

Notification with SMS and Email messages can trigger the user to visit your app. You can target this notification to a selected region when some offer is available or can push to all the devices. Tracking of products and later giving the ad and information of that same product can positively attract the user.

Synchronization

When we talk about creating a smooth experience for the user, Data synchronization is the phase when we have to continuously sync all the data between multiple systems. The customer information, payments, receipts, orders, products, and delivery must be synchronized between the system to manage and organise the frequency of data.

Testing

After the development, its turn for debugging the application in different models and versions of OS. Android has Expresso and JUnit Testing, whereas iOS uses Appium and Calabash. If any bugs found, then the application is sent back to the development team until it’s up for Launch.

Analytics

The Analysis of Data is equally essential. You still have to understand the emotion of the customer that are visiting the app or website. App Engagement, New Users, Returning Users, Mobile Device, and all the User Acquisition. The Behavior metric has parameters like a landing page, Site Speed, and other perimeters are helpful. Google has also included a select eCommerce tab to discover the revenues done by a specific product, Revenue collected by the time of day, and more. Visit Google Analytics to learn more about it.

Launching

Launching the app and websites are done more subtly, one can push the app in a small region. If everything works fine, then the team starts pushing the app to a larger scale. This way, if there is a significant app crash, the team can work on the error and can push the resolved issue. Resulting in the collecting of the feedbacks and use that data to make a non-glitchy app with fewer people affected by the build.