Deals and auctions store rebuilt from an unfinished project

The challenge

An Indian online retailer selling across several categories, including daily deals, auctions and electronics, came to us with a store that a previous developer had left unfinished on another platform. The business needed a working shop quickly, and the homepage had to sell through promotions rather than a plain product grid: deal and auction sections, a row of eight category buttons, a trust bar across the top and discount banners.

The brief listed around fifteen requirements on top of the design, from a local payment gateway and social login to SEO, a blog and bulk product handling. Just as important, the client's own team had to be able to run the promotional sections day to day without calling a developer.

What we did

Rather than continue the incomplete build, we rebuilt the store from scratch on OpenCart.

• Theme. We purchased a commercial theme and customised it to the client's layout, logo colours, homepage sections and top bar.
• Custom homepage modules. We built an eight-button category landing module, a top trust-bar module with pop-out panels, a back-to-top control and an automatic discount-percentage banner.
• Deals and auctions. Deal and auction listings were set up so that the client could create and manage them from the admin panel.
• Faster buying path. A one-page checkout and AJAX product loading kept browsing and checkout short.
• Integrations. We integrated the EBS payment gateway and Facebook login.
• SEO. SEO-friendly URLs were configured, and we handed over documentation for the SEO tools.
• Deployment and safety. After review on a staging link, we installed the store on the client's live server with a separate admin path, created FTP accounts and later supplied a full database backup of the live site as a restore point.

Tech stack

PHP, MySQL, OpenCart 1.5, commercial theme (customised), EBS payment gateway, Facebook Login, AJAX