When Eva (my better half) decided to start her own small venture (GreenTots.in), sometime in June of 2016, the second challenge we had, was to get a B2C eCommerce website up and running (first being to find a suitable name for the business). The idea was simple… an online portal for selling environment friendly baby products… and all what was needed, was a website that lets people buy the products online. While she handled the business side, I was handed over the responsibility of getting this platform up and running, and in ‘minimum time’.

As I knew from experience, even the simplest of eCommerce platform would need to have the following features, apart from the HTML web pages that list the product images..

• Inventory management: to keep track of sold out items
• Shopping Cart
• Payment gateway
• Customer management (to let users register and save their addresses etc)
• Order management
• Discount coupon management
• Security (no one will enter credit card details on a HTTP website)

Add to it the facts that the website needed to be mobile friendly (78% of the traffic has been from mobile, since the site got live!!), needed to have space for marketing banners/facebook integration… etc, and one thing was for sure… This was anything but simple..

So, started my quest to find a cheap and flexible eCommerce platform to get GreenTots.in up and running in minimum time possible. Here I talk about my thought process, as I moved from an IAAS/PAAS based solution to a simple SAAS based website in the end. If the terms IAAS/PAAS/SAAS are new to you, start by reading a primer on cloud computing

Using AWS: Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS)

One thing I was sure of (at the time)… I wanted full control and flexibility for the website… I wanted to own all the data, to have the ability to change the look and feel any time I want, to add new features as and when needed and so on… So, the first thing I did, was to create an AWS EC2 RHEL image (see our old blog post). After all, what can be more flexible in public cloud, than to own  your own virtual machine.

But, with the given requirements, and the time constraints, I soon realized one thing.. building something from scratch was not an option. So, I started investigating for available open source eCommerce platform software, and zeroed in on OpenCart.

OpenCart: Platform As A Service (PAAS)

Okay, since Opencart was installed on my own AWS image, it cannot be termed as pure cloud PAAS (I owned the platform).. Still, for practical purposes, I was bound by what OpenCart offered in terms of features, so it was as good or bad as PAAS.

Setting up Opencart was not at all difficult (found good material on google), and soon I had the first version of our website live. The website looked good and was mobile friendly… payment gateway integration was easy and the administrative dashboard was quite sleek.

But, within a couple of days, we ran into a few bugs… Also, started realizing that making changes to the standard template was not all that easy (unless you are a PHP geek)… Almost all worthy extensions were paid (and not cheap) and even good support was not free (forums were of little help). Add to it the problems I was facing with AWS (MySql instance kept shutting down due to some memory issue), and I was spending most of my evenings (and late nights) trying to debug the issues or customize the UI.

Disenchanted by this experiment, I next tried to use my experience on WordPress and played around with WooCommerce plugin…. Although easier than using OpenCart, it still needed a lot of work to get it working with all the features we needed.

Zepo: Software As A Service (SAAS)

So, after a couple of weeks of playing around with AWS and opensource eCommerce platforms, I started looking into online software solutions meant for quickly creating eCommerce websites with minimal technical know-how needed. (Eva had suggested upfront to use one of these, but the techie in me had resisted)… After spending a couple of days looking into the options, I decided to go with an Indian provider.. Zepo (it was a tough choice between Zepo and Shopify, but went with Zepo for its Indian customer support).

And wow, this was amazingly easy to setup…  Within a day, a fully functional and secure website was up, with payment provider integrated, lots of different UI themes to choose from, variety of third party marketing tools, like online chat, product reviews etc available and easy integration with google analytics. The administrative dashboard is easy to use and customer/order management is intuitive. The starter package (for around Rs2000 per month) was missing some key features, most notable being product specifications like color etc, but I was not complaining. It seemed like we have found what we needed, and didn’t feel like we were missing any needed flexibility.

But, the honeymoon period was soon over… We have been hitting too many bugs.. Some customers have reported missing items from shopping cart, others reported problems with payment gateway. There are lots of UI issues as well. I logged each one of them with their customer support.. some were fixed, others were promised to be fixed in next version (still waiting). I even shot an angry email to them asking for refund… With the number of bugs I logged, it seemed like I was paying to them for testing their product. Still the site has been running, there has been no downtime and the traffic has been increasing (slowly!).

Since I have already bought subscription for six months (till January 2017), we are stuck with them for now. But I plan to explore moving to Shopify once this period ends. Hopefully downloading all our customer data will be easy, if and and when I switch. Unfortunately though, existing customers will have to register again and will loose their order history…  but if I keep hitting bugs at this rate, I might not have an option..

Conclusion

With all these experiments in the last three months, I have realized one thing…. Unless you afford to hire a couple of developers, a SAAS solution like Zepo or Shopify is your best bet, when starting an eCommerce business.

Another realization… I lost crucial first one month in exploring IAAS/PAAS solutions, when all I needed was subscription to a SAAS platform…. something I wouldn’t have done, had I not been a technical architect… 😉

 

Posted on: 24th December 2016, by : AdityaBhushan