Daffodil develops an m-commerce app with modern database architecture for one of India’s biggest online retailers

The Daffodil team set about facilitating the retailer’s requirements by first analyzing their existing web application to prepare an initial feature roadmap for the mobile application. The UI/UX experts from the team analyzed the application’s workflow and identified limitations in its functionalities to later enhance them through upgrades. 

Mobile App Features

After the above-mentioned analysis, a wireframe for the mobile application was created, mirroring the web application’s workflow. The mobile application’s development involved the following feature integrations:

• Automated Transactions & Scheduling: Product exchange and returns management is now part of an automated module. It includes a digital wallet that contains points collected from purchases and credit amounts. The m-commerce app also includes an automated system for workflow management of sales, and it auto-schedules banners, prices, other timers, etc.
• Custom Search: The Daffodil team built a custom search engine to overcome the challenges of the previously used third-party search engine service. These limitations included slow search functionality, recurring costs, and overall manageability hurdles.
• Mobile CMS: A Content Management System (CMS) was developed that manages product catalogs, campaigns, side menus, offers, widgets, coupons, vouchers, etc. The CMS leverages Python libraries to ensure that the content is managed at run-time.

Web App Enhancements

The gaps identified in the web application were examined in-depth and the following improvement strategies were formulated and implemented seamlessly:

• Omni Channel Integration: The data around all the transactions made across the entire e-commerce platform, over the mobile app and the web app, were synchronized for a platform-independent omnichannel experience.
• DevOps Workflow: As the legacy method of deployment was leading to issues of downtime and manageability, the deployment cycle was automated with DevOps. This also solved the problem of the potential scalability of the overall platform.
• POS Modernization: The Point Of Sale (POS) system was customized to follow compliance and standards. The former challenges of feature limitations, recurring costs, and manageability were resolved.

Database Management

The retailer was facing issues with maintaining platform high-availability, and managing database capabilities such as synchronization, user security, etc. The Daffodil team identified the AWS services of Amazon RDS for re-engineering the database infrastructure cost-effectively and overcome the associated issues, in the following ways:

• High-Availability: The database instances for all the workloads generated over the web and mobile apps were made available by the team across widely distributed geographies and for longer periods without downtime. With read-write replication of instances across Availability Zones (AZ), multi-AZ deployment further boosted the availability of the platform.
• Enabling Auto-Scalability: The database capacity can now be adjusted when the data volume exceeds the preconfigured levels. AWS Auto-Scaling enables this by constantly monitoring the mobile and web applications to maintain steady connections with the database.
• Infrastructure Cost Reduction: The Amazon RDS service known as Cost Explorer was employed to visualize, understand and manage the AWS expenditure of relational database setup, management, and potential scaling, as well as usage metrics. Using graviton instances, the cost was optimized, while also boosting the performance of the cloud database itself.