E-commerce: Technology-The Differentiator

E-commerce players have been experimenting with new business models to exploit the newly emerged (not actually new but exciting) business opportunity. The mydala.com management has been very focused in developing a strong technological backbone, which is scalable as well as agile.

Technological Architecture

mydala.com's IT team designed the entire architecture in FACADE model or an open API highly scalable structure, which allowed them to integrate with other websites rapidly without needing to do any new programming. The company deployed LAMP and PIWIK, free open source web analytics systems.

So mydala.com, a discounted deals website, realized that it needs to be accessible to its any and every customer as per their location. The company, in March-April 2011, did many technology deployments including the launch of mobile platform, varnish tools for reverse proxy technique, and few open-source platforms like Google Maps and tying up with MapmyIndia.

The company launched India's first WAP site and BlackBerry app for group buying. This entire framework has been built with a common code base and a single complete platform. Therefore, these latest deployments ensured better understanding of the preferences of the users and targeting of right users at the right time with specific deals that they are likely to be interested in, instead of sending all deals to all the users.

"We grew faster than our anticipation," chuckles Ashish Bhatnagar, chief technology officer, mydala.com. "Initially, scalability was a challenge. So, we deployed 2 more dedicated servers in addition to 4 on cloud. Another challenge was the smoothness in transactions at user-end, so we deployed safety and security tools from Red Hat,"adds Bhatnagar.

Benefits

mydala's cloud based server architecture also has used performance booster tools like varnish HTTP accelerator, PHP accelerators, Memcache, etc, along with DB caching tools and running DB in memory. This, in turn, aided the company to scale up fast to handle more than 3-4 mn monthly unique visitors, currently with a page load time of 3 seconds and 99.5% uptime.

"Now, I am able to handle 1,800 PCs in comparison to 700 PCs before these deployments," adds Bhatnagar. Again, using open-source framework, mydala.com has also launched its innovative 'Deal Hunter' offering that allows users to search for deals in the locations where they want and the system is highly scalable. In the first month of launch, we received more than 10 lakh searches.

To target a wider user base, the company will soon launch their iPhone and Android apps.