That e-commerce is more about technology robustness than it is about pure retail, is now a well established fact. Myntra.com, the runner up in the e-commerce race in India so far, realised earlier in the day that building up their tech factor has to precede upping their oomph factor. This realisation was mostly the reason behind the e-commerce firm, targeting sales of Rs 500 crore by the end of this financial year, choosing to build most of its IT infrastructure and mission critical applications, in-house.
With an IT team of more than 50 engineers, Myntra has built most of its core systems in-house. Explained Mukesh Bansal, CEO, Myntra.com, “We believe in custom built systems because they can be made fit to our size and requirements. For instance, we built our warehouse management, logistics management etc, in house as opposed to using packaged software.”
The very first step towards custom built software came with an in house ERP. According to Sachin Arora, Head of Engineering, Myntra.com, “Our whole ERP stack is built in house. We decided not to approach the application vendors since we thought that the whole lot of ERP offerings available today are built from a B2B perspective, while we wanted something different. Also, our scale is huge and we felt that a traditional ERP may not be able to provide for our entire operations.” Other systems like logistics management, data warehousing etc, soon followed in ERP’s footsteps.
Cloudy beginnings
Myntra followed the Cloud route from the word go, though their Cloud strategy and outlook has undergone some tremendous shift as and how the company grew. Myntra embarked on its Cloud journey with a server hosted by Rackspace in the US. As their business grew, Bansal realised that they needed to be closer to India in order to eliminate latencies and thus, they moved to Amazon Cloud, hosted out of Singapore.
Soon enough, Singapore also proved to be a little too far, because as number of transactions per day spiked , latency started creeping into the systems. It was then that the company opted for a private Cloud based out of India. “We eventually moved from Amazon to Akamai and are now hybrid,” elaborated Arora.
According to Bansal, the main reason behind being on Cloud right from inception was scalability. Since growth rates in online commerce are hardly predictable, companies often look for an IT platform that can scale rapidly. In recent times, Cloud has emerged as an obvious answer to the scalability equation. So, last year Myntra started building its own Cloud and it took them about 6 months to deploy a robust, seamless platform.
“With Cloud, we can increase capacity in a few hours. We started with less than 5 servers and have more than 100 today. Only Cloud can manage this kind of scale,” said Bansal. Although their Cloud was up and about in 6 months, Bansal admitted that building applications from a Cloud perspective required some strategic intervention.
With their Cloud in place, Myntra is also working on its logistics network which covers 15 cites. “We have over 40 delivery centres, all of them running the central logistics system, which tracks packages in real time. This way we are not only able to give the customer a clear picture of his goods, but we can also track performance of any delivery centre, delivery agent and are able to identify bottlenecks. The entire delivery system is also integrated with Google maps that enables us to actually visualise the situation,” elaborated Bansal.
Payment gateways is the other area that Myntra is working on. “We are constantly doing active monitoring and dynamic routing of payment gateways. We monitor the payment gateways for identifying which ones have been performing better on that day or during that hour and we direct more transactions there,” Arora said. The fact that a majority of payments in India are cash on delivery (COD) does save some effort there, but Myntra had to build analytics around detecting frauds pertaining their large amounts of COD orders.
With their hybrid Cloud model clicking well for them, Myntra is now working on other aspects like analytics which they are doing with the open source vendor, Pentaho’s tools .”We are doing some open source analytics with Pentaho. We believe in having some stable open source component in whatever we have to build from a data warehouse perspective. We are slowly trying to move towards advanced analytics,” remarked Arora.
Though the e-retailer is still using the community version of Pentaho, they are actively contemplating upgrading to the commercial version of the software. According to Arora, open source is the only option available to organisations that are not willing to spend big money on propriety apps. Mobile in the pipeline With a fully automated back-end in place, Myntra is actively working to launch their mobile store. “We are planning to go big on mobile in a few months. Initially we are looking at an application based experience,” said Bansal.
New offerings and innovations are also being designed with a mobile perspective. “We are in the process of launching our Style Studio, which is a virtual dressing room and which shall be very tightly integrated with Myntra. Also, we are completely using HTML for this feature and not Flash to enable it to work better on mobile. We are simultaneously working on both mobile website and application,” revealed Arora. There is an enterprise mobility drive going on within the organisation as well, as Myntra is investing substantially in providing handhelds for their warehouse and delivery workforce. Apart from these mobile initiatives, a lot of investment is going in building data warehousing and analytics. As far as the IT strategy of the tech firm goes, they will continue to do their core stuff in-house and will look at buying components such as web analytics from the tech vendors, concluded Arora.