Building a Mobile-First E-Commerce Platform

1The Challenge

ShopLocal runs two hundred and twelve neighbourhood grocery stores across nine Indian cities. They had built the business on word of mouth and a strong store level brand, but the pandemic accelerated their need for an app. Their leadership had no in house tech team and no plans to build one. They had been quoted by two large agencies for the app build, both at numbers that worked out to roughly four times what a comparable in house build would cost, and both with twelve month timelines. The Diwali festive season was four months out. If they missed that window the business case for the app shifted from clear to marginal, and the founder was not willing to commit budget to a project that would land in January.

2The Engagement

We put together a ten person team out of Gurgaon. Three React Native developers, two PHP and Laravel backend developers, two native Android and iOS specialists who handled the UPI and card payment integrations, one UI designer, one QA engineer, and one project manager. The team worked Indian hours which matched the client. Sprints were two weeks with a Friday demo to the founder and the head of operations every alternate week.

3The Solution

The decision on day one was to keep the technology choices boring and proven. React Native for the customer app so it could ship to both stores from one codebase. Laravel for the backend because the client's existing inventory team had two engineers who could read PHP. MySQL for the database because the existing point of sale system already used it. We integrated with their existing supply chain rather than building a parallel one. Store managers got a small admin app for marking orders ready for pickup. The delivery handoff used the existing in house fleet rather than building a new courier integration. We shipped the first version of the customer app at the end of month three and used the fourth month for store level training and a phased rollout, starting with the top forty stores by foot traffic.

4The Outcome

The app launched ten days before Diwali. In the first month it picked up just over fifty thousand downloads, ahead of the internal forecast of thirty five thousand. Same day delivery covered all two hundred and twelve stores from launch day. By month six, fifteen percent of ShopLocal's total revenue was coming through the app. The app currently holds a 4.6 star rating on both the App Store and Google Play. The team has since shifted to working on the next set of features, including subscription grocery boxes and a B2B ordering channel aimed at smaller kirana retailers.

5Headline Results