Mehak Chawla examines how Snapdeal.com is using technology to manage and sustain its growth in the e-commerce space
Snapdeal believes in creating and implementing all of its technology in-house. Every user experience, right from bringing the user to the site and helping them find the right product, is based on self-built technology.
The Cloud and BI had a substantial role to play in this success.
Cloud journey
As of now, Snapdeal is on a public Cloud with Amazon. “We started moving to the Cloud almost a year back and, today, we use CDN and Web acceleration,” elaborated Misra. Snapdeal has a Java open source platform and is doing things like SOA on a fully distributed system. Added Misra, “We have custom made all of our components. That includes the Web interface, order and catalog management system, warehouse management system, shipping, delivery and tracking amongst others.”
“We went to the Cloud with the vision that it would let us concentrate on our core business. Our IT infrastructure has grown exponentially from 5-10 servers when we began, to more than a 100 servers today,” commented Misra.
Snapdeal.com collects a lot of data, which it uses for analytics. It is actively venturing into big data analytics over and above traditional BI. “We are talking about terabytes of data, the processing of which will occur in batches. We are also moving to a Hadoop kind of system where we would be taking up capacity on demand,” he added.
Challenges
“Though the Cloud is supposed to empower you, once you go on to the Cloud you are on your own.”
“It’s a problem of the Cloud having grown so fast that the people who are supporting customers on the Cloud are not able to ramp up at a matching pace,” he said.
Another challenge that IT heads face is that, generally, a Cloud offering consists of a standard stack of products. If you want to plug and play with best of breed technologies, you can’t do that. “If I want to use everything from Amazon except for the load balancer, I can’t do that. At some level, the Cloud can put limitations on you.”
Misra felt, however, that the advantages of the Cloud outweighed its limitations.
“We will never be in a situation where we would be completely off the Cloud,” he predicted.
Mobility Push
“We are leapfrogging to mobility both in terms of accessibility and simplicity in terms of usage. Developing things for the mobile is a lot harder, however,” said Misra.
Its mobile site allows for payments and it has an Android app that also supports payments. It is close to launching apps for iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone.
Tech in store
Snapdeal has grown from a catalog size of 2,000 to 15 million. It is looking to expand massively in the next two to three months.
The next big thing in store is a fraud and risk management system. “This system becomes necessary in India where cash-on-delivery is prominent. We are implementing this in order to ensure that no one gives us false addresses, locks up our inventory and games our system,” revealed Misra.
The other technology that Snapdeal is working on is to deliver a customized shopping experience for the customer. “Buying apparel is quite different from buying books. We want to customize both these experiences and bring them closer to physical reality,” said Misra.
Tech handicaps
E-commerce depends heavily on the logistics and payment ecosystem. In India, those industries are nascent and that is a hindrance to the emergence of a fully evolved e-commerce system.
Misra said, “We have to build our content management systems that can extract from more primitive data sources. Everything that goes onto the site is created by us.”
In India, the availability of payment gateways is only about 50%, so half of the transactions actually go uncompleted. “We have to build a layer of technology to address this issue at multiple levels,” said Misra. Snapdeal evaluates multiple payment gateways and tests them to see which is the highest available. It uses analytics to send out reminder emails to customers whose transactions went unfinished.
“When the underlying system is only 50% available we have been able to give an availability of close to 95%,” concluded Misra.