Yakata 2015 has come and gone, but the events leading to this momentous day will forever be etched in our memories. The engineering team at Konga, without mincing words, made giant leaps. We stepped out of our comfort zones and challenged the status quo. We built new services(we’re moving towards microservices) and improved on other critical parts of our systems, example monitoring.

A brief of what we did:

• We made conscious efforts to move away from Magento(monoliths) in favour microservices - catalog and rendering services.
• We reworked Hermes, our in-house notification as a service(NAAS) system.
• We swapped core components from PHP in favour of NodeJS.
• We moved search from SOLR to Elasticssearch.

With all these changes made, we couldn’t be happier with the outcome. Our systems survived the expected surge and scaled effortlessly. We watched traffic rise steadily and not even a single service went down. They all held their own. No downtime. From New Relic to Chartbeat even to our beloved Google Analytics, everything showed us we were doing something right.

The icing on the cake for us all came from our customers and merchants, they were visibly delighted with the event. Some merchants did 10x their usual daily trade volume. Across all categories — fashion through electronics, merchants recorded significant success and contributed over N500M to the overall GMV during the sales period.

In the first 4hrs of the sale, Konga recorded over N110,000,000 worth of orders placed. Traffic for this same period was twice what we recorded in the previous year.

Below are some of the testimonials that came in:

I sold 110 laptops yesterday. I normally sell about 10 a day... That was a huge jump. Thank you Konga. (Maxitech Global) #yakata

— SS (@SimShagaya) December 1, 2015

I think I have shipped 107 generators so far. I still have about 300 generators to ship going to different locations Estendo Power #Yakata

— SS (@SimShagaya) December 1, 2015

Orders were unexpectedly massive. I worked all night499 orders. I have shipped 246 so far. Seolak Company Limited - Konga Merchant #Yakata

— SS (@SimShagaya) December 1, 2015

"I received so many orders & they are all shoes. I am tired. In a good way o. How do I start shipping 135 orders? Chidinma A Konga Merchant

— SS (@SimShagaya) December 1, 2015

A particular merchant sold N600,000 worth of watches in 48hrs.

LR WATCHES was pleased to be part of the 1billion naira sales made by @ShopKonga #YakataSales.. N600,000 sales in 48 hours.

— Seyi (@seyi_syba) November 28, 2015

During all of these, KongaPay, Konga’s in-house payment system processed more transaction than any other payment gateway provider on the Konga’s website.

With this much success, comes so much pressure and the major pressure was that of fulfilling customers orders in record time. Below are some of what took place

A customer comes to pick her order at the Gwagwalada distribution center.

K-Express Ondo distribution center with orders ready to be dispatched to customers.

K-Express Ikorodu Items being prepared for Delivery

K-Express Calabar filled with Orders

The Yakata sales ended on a very high note with Konga processing over N1B worth of orders. First of its kind.

All of these points to one thing — ecommerce isn’t a flash in the pan, it is here to stay.

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Do you want to say hello? Email me - celestineomin@gmail.com

I tweet at @cyberomin