How We Built the Niche eCommerce Web Application - Jewelegance
- an End-to-end Digital Marketplace for High-value Jewellery Store Owners
Project Scope
To build an end-to-end eCommerce web application for Jewellery.
Scale
5,000 products at inception, to be expanded up to 15,000 over time.
Inception:
Duration:
Current Status:
Maintenance & Support
Team:
2 Developers
1 Product Designer
1 Project Manager
1 Quality Analyst
How It All Began
Ever since the rise of virtual payments, eCommerce platforms have been all the rage. Back in 2018, we were approached by a client in Ahmedabad, India who wanted an eCommerce platform to be built from scratch for their thriving Jewellery business. While their competitors sold their products physically in stores, the client wanted to go a step beyond traditional selling by showcasing their products digitally and enabling online purchases.
Initial Discussion with Our Team
After an initial review of the client’s proposal, we concluded that since the client was still generating a limited demand for their products, it might be too early to build a stand-alone platform. A project of such a scale would entail significant burning out of the client’s resources like time, money, and marketing. Secondly, the client could easily take their current sales activity online by advertising & selling their products through social media such as Facebook and Instagram. Based on the response in those channels, we could then anticipate future demand and build a platform when it seemed viable.
Over the next 2-3 months, the demand for their products surged manifold. This paved the way for us to go ahead with the development of an end-to-end eCommerce platform, and thus, Project Jewelegance was officially kickstarted at Digicorp.
Mapping the Client’s Needs
Timeline
In order to attain first-mover’s advantage, the client wanted the application to be launched within 6 to 8 months.
Payment Integration
To overcome the limitations of social media, they wanted a dedicated platform where end-to-end transactions could take place along with advanced features like shipment tracking, refund handling, and so on.
Responsiveness
Due to the soaring increase in mobile usage, the web application needed to be responsive so that it could be run on computers, tablets and mobile devices.
Scalability
At the outset, the client wanted to showcase around 5000 products on the platform, which would then be expanded to 10,000-15,000 over time.
Project Execution by Digicorp Team
We assigned two Developers, a Product Designer and a Project Manager to spearhead the Jewelegance project. Since the platform was going to be used by diverse store owners of high-end jewellery to showcase their products, it was crucial to understand and incorporate their unique needs into the platform’s back-end features as well as front-end design. In this context, one of our technical consultants who was instrumental in connecting us with the client during the early days of the project, came to our aid. He constantly engaged with the store owners to generate timely feedback and responses to our queries.
Our dedicated team handled all aspects of the product development, from UI and UX to quality assurance and testing. The front-end design was created with our own UI-based framework, Propeller, which contains a library of all the basic design components for websites, web applications and mobile applications. This gave us the added advantage by saving more than 30% of the time spent on developing the application.
Technologies & Capabilities Deployed
For front-end development, we used Angular, while for back-end development, we used Node.JS. Through iterative development of wireframes, designs and clickable prototypes, we ensured the first soft-launch of the application within 6 months from the inception of the project. Thereafter, several more features were added gradually. The entire application development including optimization and integration of payment processes took nearly a year, but marketing outreach for the eCommerce platform began at the 6-month mark.
Due to the large scale of the project, we decided to separate the functions of development and testing and also hired a dedicated Quality Analyst. Quality Assurance was an extremely important part of this project. It was necessary to ensure that all the images loaded accurately and quickly, that every UI element displayed correctly and that there were no glitches during customer transactions.
Current Status - Ongoing Support & Maintenance
The platform has been up and running for nearly one and a half years now with regular sales taking place. It has been able to rake in impressive revenue figures through pan-India sales – and this is just the beginning! We continue to provide post-launch support and feature- enhancement to Jewelegance with a dedicated team of one Developer and one Quality Analyst who are available on-demand to answer client queries, provide support with issues and make sure that the platform is always up-to-date.
Jewelegance and the jewellery store owners who now sell through the platform have been ruling the Ahmedabad jewellery market for more than fifty years now with high-quality ornaments. By enabling them to disrupt the market with e-commerce, we have been able to combine their heritage with next-generation technology that will generate incredible benefits in the years to come.