The Sultan Center
The Sultan Center (TSC), a prominent retail chain headquartered in Kuwait, operates over 70 stores across Kuwait, Oman, Jordan, and Bahrain, establishing itself as a key player in the Middle East’s FMCG sector. To enhance its digital footprint and elevate customer convenience, we developed a high-performance website powered by PostgreSQL, along with native mobile applications using Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS. The platform offers a seamless and intuitive shopping experience, reflecting TSC’s commitment to innovation and excellence in modern retail.
About Project
The Sultan Center (TSC) is a leading online retailer that offers a diverse range of products, including groceries, fresh produce, home goods, and fashion categories. The project uses Bagisto to build their entire eCommerce store on an open-source Laravel eCommerce platform for speed and performance optimization, as well as a cost-effective solution and customizable architecture to tailor their online store to meet its specific requirements. This move aims to enhance customer experience and streamline online transactions. TSC ensures that customers across diverse locations can access its products effortlessly.
E-commerce and OMS Platform
Business
Middle East
Location
Business Goal
The project’s business goals were to make grocery shopping faster, smarter, and more convenient for our customers. Our goal was to speed up deliveries using a Q-commerce model, while ensuring our order management system could handle everything for real-time inventory visibility and fulfillment accuracy. At the same time, we focused on creating a smooth shopping experience across both web and mobile, with faster checkouts, better product suggestions, and insights that help us serve our customers even better.
Project Highlights
- Moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL
- User-Friendly Interface
- Responsive design
- Headless e-commerce (Vue.js)
- Customer multi-country app (Android/iOS)
- Bulk product upload
- Multi-order picking as per cluster
- Performance Optimized
- Quick e-commerce (Rush Delivery)
- Order Delivery Management
- Product mapping as per store layout
- Instabug integration in apps
Elevated the UI/UX
The Sultan Center redesign, based on Figma design, introduced a clean, user-friendly web and mobile-responsive website as well as Android and iOS app layouts with features like improved home, product filters, product list pages, product view, checkout, and cart. A Home interface and interactive contact widgets enhanced usability and support.
Key Challenges
Moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL
Migrating from MySQL to PostgreSQL required careful handling of differences in SQL syntax, data types, indexing strategies, and performance tuning, along with ensuring application compatibility and minimal downtime during the transition.
Multipicking
Implementing multi-picking in a grocery e-commerce platform involved complex order grouping, real-time inventory coordination, and route optimization to ensure picking efficiency without compromising order accuracy or delivery timelines.
Multi-Inventory
Managing multi-inventory in a grocery e-commerce platform requires real-time stock synchronization across multiple locations, complex fulfillment logic, and accurate order routing to prevent stockouts and ensure timely deliveries.
Performance
Ensuring fast page load times and reliable API response under high traffic conditions, while managing backend processing and data flow efficiently to maintain a smooth user experience.
Our Solutions
To enhance the performance, we implemented a series of optimization techniques focused on reducing response time and improving scalability. We began by analyzing and optimizing slow database queries, adding appropriate indexing, and using pagination to handle large datasets efficiently. Caching frequently requested data with tools like Redis significantly reduces redundant database access. We also moved resource-intensive tasks, such as sending notifications and third-party API calls, to asynchronous background jobs, freeing up the main request thread. We also refactored the code logic by minimizing nested loops, optimizing data handling and reducing the size of payloads being processed and returned. Continuous monitoring to identify bottlenecks and fine-tune performance.
Moving from MySQL to PostgreSQL
AWS has deprecated MySQL 5.7, prompting a migration to MySQL 8. However, during testing and initial deployment, we encountered significant performance issues with MySQL 8 in our environment. After a thorough evaluation, we decided to migrate our database to PostgreSQL. This transition effectively resolved the performance bottlenecks and provided better scalability and query optimization for our use case. PostgreSQL offered advanced indexing (GIN, BRIN), better JSONB support for semi-structured data, and improved concurrency handling through MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control). Additionally, PostgreSQL’s richer feature set for analytical queries and full-text search made it a better long-term fit as the application scaled.
Real-Time Multi-Inventory Synchronization
In a Laravel-based e-commerce system, managing a multi-inventory setup across multiple store locations introduces several technical challenges. One of the primary issues is ensuring real-time synchronization of stock levels to prevent overselling or stock mismatches. We used to update inventory instantly across all stores whenever a product was purchased, returned, or restocked. Handling concurrent updates in high-traffic situations was another concern. To solve this, we used Laravel’s database transactions and row-level locking to prevent race conditions during stock updates.
Cross-Browser Compatibility
In a Laravel-Vue. A JS-based e-commerce application, ensuring cross-browser compatibility is essential to provide a consistent and reliable user experience across all major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and mobile browsers. While Laravel handles backend operations such as authentication, inventory, and order processing, the user interface and interactions are primarily managed through Vue.js components. This separation requires careful coordination to avoid inconsistencies between browsers. Modern JavaScript features in Vue components were compiled using Babel, ensuring that the code runs smoothly even in browsers with limited ES6+ support. We also followed responsive and semantic HTML practices, used normalized CSS resets, and ensured accessibility features were implemented correctly.
Performance Optimization
We implemented advanced optimization techniques focused on query performance, code efficiency, and scalable architecture. This included caching, asynchronous processing, payload reduction, and background job handling to deliver faster API responses and reduce server load. Redis and Laravel’s cache facade were used for frequently accessed endpoints. Queue workers offloaded tasks like email/SMS notifications and third-party API syncing. We replaced N+1 query patterns with eager loading, compressed large API responses with GZIP, and optimized Blade rendering to reduce memory usage. Regular profiling using Laravel Telescope and Blackfire helped us continuously fine-tune performance bottlenecks across routes and controllers.
Our Approach
In our project, we followed a sprint-based approach using Agile methodology to ensure structured, iterative progress and continuous delivery. Each sprint involved clearly defined goals, tasks, and deliverables. We conducted sprint planning to prioritize features or bug fixes based on business needs and team capacity. Tasks were broken down into manageable units, assigned to developers, and tracked using the ClickUp tool. Daily stand-up meetings helped maintain transparency, allowing the team to sync up on progress, address blockers, and adjust priorities if needed. It also improved collaboration between developers, testers, and product owners, leading to faster development cycles and higher product quality.
UI/UX Prototyping
UI/UX prototyping plays a critical role in the development process by providing a visual and interactive representation of the application before any code is written. It helps align the product vision among stakeholders, designers, and developers by clearly demonstrating user flows, layouts, and functionality.
QA & UAT
In our project, QA and UAT play a critical role in ensuring a smooth, secure, and reliable shopping experience. QA focuses on systematically testing all functionalities—such as product browsing, cart operations, payment gateways, order management and user authentication to identify bugs, performance issues or integration errors.
Third-Party App Integration
Seamlessly integrated third-party services such as the payment gateway, loyalty program, and advanced search functionality to enhance user experience and align with business objectives.
Project Planning
Adopted a sprint-based Agile approach, defined tasks via ClickUp, ensured collaboration via stand-ups, and prioritized deliverables for structured and faster development.
Technology Stack
- CMS
- Programming Languages
- Database
- App
Bagisto (Laravel-based)
Javascript
PHP (Laravel)
CSS 3
HTML 5
PostGre SQL
Android-kotlin
iOS-Swift
Key Result
Seamless Integrations
All third-party tools functioned smoothly, enhancing payments, analytics, and support.
Faster Load Times
We implemented performance optimization techniques to ensure that all pages load smoothly and consistently, even during periods of high user traffic.
Higher Order Conversion Rates
Achieved higher order conversion rates by optimizing the user journey, improving site performance, and streamlining the checkout process in the e-commerce platform.
Reduced Order Fulfillment Time
Achieved faster order picking and delivery by implementing multi-picking workflows and automated NCR cashiering, resulting in improved operational efficiency and reduced fulfillment time.
What Our Client Says
Mr. Ebenezer Daniel
Chief Digital Officer (CDO) @ Alessa Med, Omnichannel & Group IT - Virtus Holding
We always have direct access to the developers, and their understanding of the e-commerce field is impressive.
Mr. Devanjan Roy
Technology Manager , The Sultan Center
The noteworthy characteristic of their team is that they stick to commitments.
Mr. Pradeep Hirani
Chairman, Kimaya Fashions Pvt Ltd
We were extremely happy with Techsevin, Mounish has this great ability to see through the clutter... and devise a practical, easy to navigate approach to problem..He cuts through the jargon, and delivers.
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