Qwixit: 300+ orders a month

The client, the US company Pochtoy LLC, runs its own warehouse in Delaware. Its customers live in Russia and want genuine products from US stores and brands: New Balance, Nike, Adidas, Levi's, Tommy Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, Coach, iHerb.

US stores do not accept Russian cards and do not ship to Russia. The service covers the whole chain: the price is in rubles right away, payment by a Russian card or via SBP, a buyer purchases the item, delivery to a pickup point.

The client had no platform at all: neither a website nor an ordering process.

The whole product is built around one chain, which the customer sees on the product page as the estimated delivery date.

The client wanted to launch quickly on a ready-made platform, so the team took tlcommerce as the base and reworked it heavily. Each layer of the architecture answers a specific business need.

• STOREFRONTStorefront

  A Vue 3 SPA with Pinia and SASS. Product pages are rendered on the server by Laravel: customers come from search for a specific product, and search engines need a ready page.

• APIModular REST

  Catalog, categories and site settings, menus and sliders, sections of the home page and the header, interface dictionaries. The modules are split so the operator can change menus, banners and home page sections without developers.

  • ecommerce-core
  • theme
  • widgets
  • locale
• SERVICESGo modules

  Heavy queries and parallel computations live in Go modules, queues run on RabbitMQ. This way a catalog of a million products handles load peaks, and customers do not wait for pages to load.

• DATAStorage

  PostgreSQL as the main database, Elasticsearch for search and the catalog, Redis for cache and sessions, ClickHouse for analytics, S3 / MinIO for media. Each storage has its own job: search across a million products and sales reports do not load the main database that holds the orders.

The operator manages orders, products, promo codes and bonuses, changes banners and turns on holiday themes, for example for New Year. All of this is set up in the admin panel, which has a section for each task. No release is needed for that: the home page and the header are assembled from widgets that come from the API.

Interface texts are loaded from a separate locale endpoint, so more languages can be added without a rewrite.

The catalog is filled automatically, by parsing. A special program goes through the websites of the US stores the client is ready to deliver from and collects their products: names, photos, prices and availability. This is how the catalog reached about a million products without adding each item by hand.

The service handles personal data of customers, including the data required for customs clearance. Sensitive fields are stored encrypted in the database, and the encryption key is kept apart from the code and the database. Access is split by roles: customer, operator, administrator.

The project has three kinds of tests: component tests in Vitest, visual regression tests against reference screenshots of blocks and E2E tests in Playwright for the critical scenarios, from the catalog to payment. They catch bugs before the release, not after customer complaints.

Every task passes CI checks and a test stand, then on the planned release date it goes to a pre-release stand identical to the live site. After acceptance the release rolls out to the live site without downtime, and in case of trouble it can be quickly rolled back to the previous stable version.

1. develop test stand
2. preprod acceptance
3. master live site without downtime

The team worked in two-week sprints. After each one the client saw what was done, what was not and why, and agreed on the plan for the next two weeks together with the team. The well-tuned process directly shaped the result: the store launched in 3 months, releases did not break checkout, and 2.5 months after launch the client reached the goal of 300+ orders a month.

At handover the client's team received the documentation: step-by-step setup, environment variables, the list of integrations, and Storybook with the components of the storefront and the admin panel.