WebInterpret: Optimizing e-commerce automation to cut incidents by 99.97%

Introduction

Webinterpret adapts customers’ eCommerce products and pages for international markets, including translation of language and product sizing.

Pragmatic Coders provided a dedicated team that helped WebInterpret scale its platform. Eventually, our developers became a core part of the R&D team that solved dozens of problems and implemented new ideas and technologies. The experience and knowledge that Pragmatic Coders brought to the project resulted in many technical and business benefits and lead to significant growth of the WebInterpret.

The challenge

The client struggled with the growth of one of their main products – an international e-commerce platform. They needed a qualified technology partner, who would take their business to the next level in terms of technology, ideas, and IT development. Originally, most of the business and non-functional requirements remained undiscovered. It was a joint journey to learn the business domain and figure out the way to put financial data into the cloud.

The solutions

We started cooperation with Webinterpret by determining the most pressing problems and handling them first: Integration of incident tracking tool and production problem-solving. 

• After we introduced Sentry (incident tracking tool) we were able to decrease the number of incidents from 1.5M to around 500 incidents per day. 
• Redesigned and rewrote basic system processes with the efficiency of processing in mind. All of that without losing the data consistency. Thanks to that the average time needed to fetch and process users’ inventory decreased from a few weeks to a few hours.
• Solve the scalability issue caused by excessive usage of database queries and wrong usage of indexes. Thanks to the database optimization we have not only allowed future product scaling but also managed to decrease the cost of the infrastructure by 60% while the number of system users increased by 800%. 
• Migrate the system from deprecated technologies (Python 2.6, MySQL 5.5) to the current stable solutions. It saved the system from technical death and reduced the costs of maintenance by the operation team.