Bagisto - Laravel eCommerce

Insights Report in Bagisto
Access Control Level in Bagisto
Bagisto Technologies
Bagisto Features
Bagisto Add-Ons
Bagisto Marketplace
Bagisto Product SEO
Bagisto Seller Price Comparisons
Multi Store Inventory in Bagisto
Bagisto Multi Vendor Marketplace

Inspiration

For a long time, there has been a huge gap between the eCommerce ecosystem and the popular PHP framework Laravel. Bagisto is an initiative to bridge the gap between both entities so any developer having knowledge of MVC architecture platform like Laravel can easily build an online eCommerce website.

What it does

Bagisto is an opensource eCommerce platform built on Laravel using which anyone can build their own online eCommerce website and scale it. Its a platform is driven commerce helpful for developers working on MVC architecture to customise the solution as per their needs.

How I built it

Our parent company, Webkul has been working in the eCommerce ecosystem for the past 10 years on the major frameworks like Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop and others. We noted down a lot of pros and cons and what is the need for current eCommerce for merchants. To fulfil those things, a lot of brainstorming went into choosing the framework on which to make Bagisto. After multiple rounds of talks, it was decided to use Laravel and a progressive javascript framework Vue.js and so how it gets started.

Challenges I ran into

There are certain challenges that we faced while working for open-source application:

Building Community

Open Source is all about community. The application can only succeed if a good number of community developers can easily adopt it, customise it for their use and further build extensions or plugins for it. Then, it's also important that industry leaders and companies recognise it and start using it for their customers.

Partners

As important as the community is there, so are the partners. Partnering with different companies or events or developer communities across geographical regions helps in spreading the word by organising meetups, conferences, hackathons etc. They act as the sole point of contact for the people in their region in helping them adopt the application.

SERP Rankings

Search rankings do affect on getting organic and inorganic traffic to your application. If you are providing a specific sort of application and if the community cannot find you on google search, you are certainly losing a lot of potential customers. It was a challenge for us to get on top of google ranking for certain common keywords that are related to our application.

Support

Support is something that is common with every other new venture. If the community feels like that core application team has got their back covered whenever they bump into any issue, they feel confident in using the application. Providing round the clock support is something one of the core challenges for us to get sorted out.

Overcoming Challenges

Over a period of time, we kept experimenting with things. In some we fail, in some, we succeed. But still the process continues and there’s not one thing that we are using till now. At first, it was very important for us to build solid core tech. Until and unless the core platform is strong, nobody is going to try out. We also knew support was going to be very crucial so we kept all doors open so anyone can reach us easily. From live chat to Skype, to forums, to Facebook Community and email, we adopted all sorts of communication methods so the community feels at ease to connect with us for any of their queries.

Over a period of time, we published many video tutorials, precise documentation and wrote articles so people can easily find solutions for the most common problem in Bagisto. This helps us a lot in building a community on Facebook and Forums. We partnered with many of our core contributors by promoting them on social channels and their contribution done in our platforms. We even kept our partnership very much at the ease of our vendors. By offering a free promotion to third party extensions, commission-free sale and even assisting in further selling their extension helps us gain more partners building their own extension for bagisto.

The parent company backing the open-source project is nothing short of the need of an hour that keeps as going and moving forward. The project as of today receives commits every hour a day that shows the continuous activity going on the application and entrusts belief in the mind of the end-user about the stability and reliability of the product.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Its been 2 Yrs only but Bagisto as of now is one of the fastest-growing opensource eCommerce solutions of today and has established itself as India’s First Opensource Success story in eCommerce space.

Facts do speak for itself. On Oct 31st, 2018, Bagisto’s first release came in the market. 2 years from then, Bagisto has accumulated 3000+ Github Stars, 30,000+ Downloads, 80+ Contributors, 200k+ User Base, 2 active communities running in Brazil & Belgium and 1500+ members have joined the opensource revolution.

What I learned

There’s not one rule of success as you may read on the internet. You have to give it all. Be true and honest with your work, sooner or later it will be well paid off. Nothing goes in vain. You need to keep learning and trying new things. Even if you fail, you need to fail fast so you can quickly build on a new strategy.