A high-load marketplace with a wide range of products available for resellers

The marketplace presents products and operates on a business-to-business model, where vendors are manufacturers and wholesalers, and buyers are retail companies and resellers.
The site presents more than 300K products of a wide range.

Main goals

The client contacted us immediately after the project launch with a request to make several modifications and with a complaint about the low working speed. Despite the fact that the site was provided with the best infrastructure, the speed has been dropping from traffic and unoptimized loads. The mobile app didn’t work at all. In addition, the site code was in such a state that when any modification was made it led to fatal errors.

We were faced with the following tasks:

Perform a complete code refactoring.
Optimize site working speed.
Improve the mobile app.
Improve the next list of functionality: search, synchronization with Shopify, payment, integration, communication with customers.

Our work process

When we just touched on code optimization, we realized that everything needed to be redone completely. Multiple modifications were not functional, so we created new functionality and optimized and improved the code.

In order for the marketplace to sell and remain operational, we optimized the work of the catalog, products, and the ordering process.

Catalog search

Since the site contains a huge number of products, the search should work as quickly as possible so as not to make buyers wait for a response. Initially, a third-party solution from Elasticsearch was proposed for this. But certain existing store modifications did not work with this add-on, which led to issues such as displaying products without a price, pictures, etc. Negotiations and attempts to finalize the add-on were not successful.

Therefore, we developed our own fast Elasticsearch, and remade the code so that anyone can extend it for their modifications in the future.

Customer communication system

We created chats for communicating with clients and vendors so that all messages from one buyer are formed into a single chat. We added the ability to attach files and products directly to the chat. Customers can click on the message directly from the chat, add the product to cart and buy it immediately. This serves as an additional source of promotion and sales.

Sending emails to a list of users with one button. Each item will be sent as a separate message to each user. And in order to reduce the load on the server, we created a queue for sending no more than 200 letters at a time.

As a result, 368,000 messages were sent in 2 months, and more than 7,700 chats were created.

Mobile app

The app’s start page took more than 40 seconds to load because the mobile app had to access the main site. As a result, users were switching to the web version of the store. The percentage of failures due to slow operation was very high.
Thanks to query optimization, the load on the server has decreased, application data has become processed and transmitted faster.

Mobile application traffic increased 3 times.

Installment purchases

Resellers order more than the average buyer. Therefore, their order totals can be significant. To make shopping more affordable, customers can buy now and pay later thanks to integration with the Klarna and ClearPay payment systems from the Stripe aggregator. This allows you to attract new customers and increase the flexibility in payments on the marketplace.

Sync products with Shopify

Many vendors sell their products on Shopify and use it as their main system. The main add-on for synchronizing products with Shopify did not work correctly and for a long time. The product import has been launched every 24 hours, but did not have enough time to be complete in a day. After vain attempts to finalize this add-on, we made our own. Now the products are synchronized with Shopify in a span of 6 hours, and it is now convenient for vendors to sell on two platforms.

Payment routing

We have changed the logic of payment transfers to vendors. As soon as the order goes into the “sent” status, a transfer of the required amount is immediately sent to the vendor. The admin has the ability to manually adjust the amount, if necessary, directly from the admin panel.

Working with partial returns on the marketplace is always more difficult than in online stores. And there are many partial returns on Gowholesale. We have automated debiting the required part of the amount and part of the commission from the vendor.

New vendor’s products

If a new vendor uploads 200 products, then only their products will be displayed in the updates. We have made it so that the catalog shows a variety of vendor’s products, regardless of sorting by new or popular, products will be ranked in such a way that two new products will be picked from each vendor.

This provides opportunities for new vendors to promote their products.

Separate delivery by regions

If the buyer is not from the UK, but for example from the USA or Europe, then the vendor will see the address of the marketplace, and not the buyer, to send the order. As a result, the products are sent to the marketplace, and the buyer pays for shipping only once.

Individual offers

The client has the opportunity to offer the vendor his own price for the products. In this case, notifications for the vendor are sent via email, but there is no possibility to edit them.
To make offers in a neat format and make them more personalized, our add-on puts these notifications in an editable mode.

Minimizing the risks of loss of profit

In order for customers to make purchases only on the marketplace, and not contact sellers directly, the Vendor communication sanitize add-on automatically strips all contact information from messages. All transactions remain on the side of the marketplace.