The Initial Challenge: A Digital Ecosystem in Crisis

What happens when you have an unstable platform in the competitive world of e-commerce? It can significantly threaten your business flow, especially when you’re selling digital products.

This was the case for our client, who operates across 80 shops and processed nearly 250,000 orders within the last 6 years. Their system was facing technical issues that weren’t allowing them to use the full potential of their business.

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Together with our client, we decided to do a complete check of the app, and we found things that needed to be addressed - payments and product deliveries were repeatedly crashing, developers had to spend a significant amount of time manually fixing broken orders, and had less space to improve the platform. Additionally, the system was vulnerable to cybersecurity threats, including DDOS attacks—a type of digital assault where hackers overwhelm a website's servers to make it crash or become inaccessible.

Among other diagnosed issues was a server overload with big deliveries, turning off in the middle of delivery, causing problems with order deliveries, and pointedly affecting business operation during increased shopper activity, like the winter Holiday or Easter season.

That required the client’s developers to be available all around the clock in case of system breakdowns.

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Both the front-end and back-end code bases were hard to maintain, due to legacy code unprepared for scaling. Any new feature or bug fix would take four times longer than it should.

And with no automated monitoring, the only data source was the app logs.

Several elements needed attention, and setting priorities was crucial to launch the rebuilding process.

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The Digital Transformation Journey We Went Through

At first, we started cooperating with the client within a narrow scope, helping maintain the project and fix orders manually in case anything broke. In the long run, we saw that fixing and maintaining consumed most of the contracted time, not enabling the development of new features or implementing them from scratch.

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The next major step was modernising the front-end and rebuilding the user interface using the latest React.js technologies (the most popular technology for building interactive web applications). Our customer decided to extend the scope and team to make it happen. This was more than a cosmetic upgrade—it was about creating a robust, reliable experience for every user. The upgrade also made it easier to maintain and introduce new features, and the system is now ready for the new initiatives and business ideas that our client has.

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Moreover, together with our client, we migrated the whole backend to a new infrastructure to be able to provide the following:

• Autoscaling: possibility to spin up more server application instances in case of big traffic, 
• High reliability: updates are being performed without downtime, and deployments of new services do not affect the running servers.
• Security: API Gateways and key infrastructure parts built using Amazon Web Services, including prevention from DDOS attacks.
• Infrastructure decomposition & configuration: possibility to replace system parts without affecting the external API contracts.
• Development & deployment: improved stability of deployment with pre-built artefacts (the files produced as part of the development process) and full automation of the processes
• Observability: possibility to monitor separate infrastructure parts from their own angle and alert on found anomalies.

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All of this was implemented using the Terraform - IaC (infrastructure-as-code) solution, which provides system portability in case the client would like to migrate to another AWS instance.

The migration to the new infrastructure with the new front-end solution was carefully planned and executed. We didn't just switch everything overnight—instead, we gradually moved shop by shop, always maintaining a backup plan. This meticulous approach meant minimal disruption to the client's business operations.

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The Outcome of the Transformation

What was once a source of stress became a model of efficiency. Large-scale digital product deliveries that previously would endanger the system with crashing now happen seamlessly. Currently, even up to 5,000 digital product orders can be handled simultaneously without any issues.

Thanks to end-to-end testing, our customers’ tech team has significantly decreased the time spent by testers on manual regression testing and reduced the number of bugs.

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During the critical holiday season—traditionally stressful—the platform performed flawlessly. Zero issues, zero customer complaints. 

There are still instances of bugs in the system due to the remaining old back-end codebase. But we’re continuing the tech transformation by migrating the back-end to NestJS, allowing us to roll out new features both on the back-end and front-end. Our clients’ development team can finally focus on creating new features instead of having to watch out for potential technological issues.

Lastly, together we’ve reached the highest security standards thanks to basing the infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, ensuring maximal system resistance to DDOS attacks.

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We hope that this story will inspire you to acknowledge the power of strategic digital transformation. Sometimes, all a great business needs to flourish fully is a little technological push towards smart infrastructure and prioritising both performance and security to have a robust, scalable digital ecosystem.

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Do you have any questions? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us at hi@koiasoft.no!

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