Breaking into the Indian ecommerce space

Before I start telling you the story, I’m going to do an experiment. I’ll write the summary of this post first, just to stick you around, in case you are one among the people who don’t read to the end.

TL;DR

Myntra is India’s largest online fashion and lifestyle store, as they say. Which is owned by Flipkart, one of the big players in Indian E-commerce.

I found a little opening in the flow of their online movement and used it to collect some information(not private though). Using this information we can see the way ‘online shopping’ is escalating in the country, and the role Myntra and the people are playing in it.

Sounds interesting? Hold on.

Emergence of the idea

Let me tell you, how did I get started with this.

All this happened recently, when I was looking for some T-Shirts with my friend. We placed a shared order for two and a pair of shoes.

Whenever you order from Myntra, you get a text message on your registered mobile number, giving you a link where you can track your order. Each order is given a unique identifier of length 4 because it’s a shortened URL to fit well in a text message.

I opened that link in my phone and it worked, saying that the details of your order are yet to be updated. Then I tried a different URL, not mine, of course, all thanks to my disruptive mind. It worked again, now this was something to pay attention to.

You know, 4 is a nanoscopic number if a computer is your best friend. I think you can guess what happened next, I couldn’t sleep properly thinking about my next move to just have all the order details. Right from crawling and storing the data to analysing it.

Crawler Infrastructure

Being a pessimistic person, as one of my friends calls me. I end up thinking too much about all the possible edge cases. Something similar happened with the design of the crawling system.

As the saying goes, “A thief believes everybody steals”. I was afraid that my collection signatures(IP) will be blocked.

If you have read my last post Jump in to ride all the Bangalore taxis, at once; I said that you should not hit the resource at a constant time period, it’s a basic heuristic to identify bots. I considered that, it was a simple thing.

Now comes the main thing I was afraid of, “What if they catch me while trying to collect all the orders in a sequential manner (alphabetically increasing uid)”?

As I couldn’t take a risk of losing the data, I designed my solution around it. I developed two things, Engine and Station.

Engine is the one who takes care of the identifier generation and distribution. It uses a little group theory and anagram properties to generate non-sequential unique identifiers of fixed length. It generates them in advance and serve you on demand while taking care of the stock by generating in the background when you start approaching the bottom of the vessel. To know more about Engine, you can stalk its repository.

Statistical nature of the data

When does India shop?

From where does India shop?

How long does it take to deliver your order?

Shared Logistics

‘End of Reason Sale’ Purchase Behavior

Brands on the platform

Do small shopkeepers purchase online to sell in their locality?

Inference

Probable Fix

Disclaimer