Usha Informatique: Switching the Market Paradigm from Store to Web

Mayank Singhai, CTO

The growth of e-commerce at breakneck speed is gradually blurring the distinction between offline and online retailing. While the major e-retail brands are adopting multiple channels to provide a suave and seamless consumer experience, large and small retail stores, on the contrary, are investing in massive proportions to amplify their presence from store to screens. This e-commerce movement is driving in the intense necessity of turnkey open source SaaS platforms that would make it easy for merchants to move their businesses to the web. Driven by this major dearth in the industry, Gurgaon, India-based Usha Informatique is striving to create high-performance online marketplaces for vendors who are looking forward to leverage profitability by penetrating the online retail space. The company, founded in 2007 by Shashank Jain and Sabir Mallick, provides an extensive range of website and software development solutions to mitigate the pain-points of building an effective e-commerce website.

Previously, while taking the assistance of existing software like Opencart, Magento etc., the company came across a number of performance bottlenecks owing to utilization of obsolete technological practices. To bridge the gaps, Usha Informatique on October 2016 launched the foremost version of WhatACart- an open source e-commerce platform equipped with the latest technologies to help businesses develop and grow their online market swiftly and extensively.

“WhatACart is built on top of the Yii2 framework and is crafted in such an intuitive way that it would be much easier for customers to understand the setup and designing part of it,” asserts Mayank Singhai, Chief Technical Officer at Usha Informatique.

Retail stores are investing in huge proportions to amplify their presence from store to screens

WhatACart is a completely ready-to-deploy solution that demands its users only to download, set up and add product related APIs. Effortlessly incorporable multiple languages and currencies certainly add to the unique selling propositions of WhatACart. The platform is also equipped with an open and accessible tax management system which is based on factors like tax slab particularly associated with products and tax zones. Unlike the existing software in the market, the company has programmed a simpler single-paged checkout interface that helps brands in retaining customers, resulting in enriched consumer experience. WhatACart inherits all the advantages of Yii2, one of the most popular frameworks in PHP. With an extraordinary amalgamation of features on both back-end and front-end, WhatACart, for developers, is an easily maintainable and scalable platform.

Alongside their flagship product, WhatACart, Usha Informatique also specializes in migration services, custom web development, and CRM solutions. The company has developed an MLM (Multi Level Marketing) platform for a leading garments firm to lighten a massive load of manual labor —keeping track of all the company’s associates involved in direct selling. Other verticals of the company’s services include security and compliance assistance for e-commercial platforms- taking thorough care of selling regulations and PCIDSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) guidelines before setting up an online store.

The team at Usha Informatique and WhatACart work in close collaboration with clients, trying to figure out their business, its execution procedures and the reason behind their need of an e-commerce platform. The aftermath of such probing research involves personalized and profitable solutions tailored according to the challenges being faced.

Following the company’s roadmap, the second version of WhatACart is supposed to make its advent in June 2017. Moving forward, the incremental releases are going to be provisioned with a bunch of extensions which would add the capability to the platform to use more payment gateways and shipping methods. The company also plans on launching a platform where developers and designers can market and sell their extensions. With a diversified line-up of products and services in multiple horizontals, Usha Informatique looks forward to brainchild more technologically futuristic innovations in the e-commercial business space.