The story of custom built applications:
Today I was trying to order a product on Big Basket, a website which has been in business since 2011 and well known in India. Now on the product page I wanted to know how much they would charge for the delivery charge, funnily that option was not there on the product page, and it wanted me to go the checkout page to see the delivery charge, well NOT that customer friendly if you would ask me so!
Anyways long story cut short I did go to the checkout page and there I didn’t see any guest login it asked me to register and I didn’t want to go through the whole process and I started looking for shortcuts, thankfully they had some social networking logins so you I used my Facebook login, which was successful, BUT surprisingly on the checkout page, I was not able to enter my delivery address, the entire screen locked me out. Here is the screenshot: 
Now being a IT person myself I suspected that the issue came ONLY because I had logged in through my Facebook and for some reasons some thing went wrong in the checkout page!
By the way the website is custom coded in Django, so it is a custom built application. For people who don’t know what Django is :
“Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.”
So that means they did spend on it a very good amount and of course the time as well.
This makes me think why QC is so important. If proper quality check was done then this issue would have been known and instead of losing sales Big basket would have been earning money.
Social network login is not a minor thing most of the customers use this as it is a shortcut and they don’t want to go through the tiresome process of filling up the entire registration form!
So anyways coming back to the original issue:
I don’t see any benefit this website owner achieved by using ‘Django’ it is not only this particular website But many large companies want their applications to be custom coded, well I am not against that BUT it unless you have proper QC team then please DON’T do opt for a custom built application.
Companies like these spend tons of money on advertisement and bugs like these cause a huge loss.
We ourselves have built applications in PHP/MYSQL but like I said QC is essential and must!
So anyways if you don’t have the time and energy for this then hire a magento expert and get a magento website built or hire a WordPress expert and get a WordPress website built with woocommerce for its eCommerce functionality. There are more than a dozen ecommerce platforms available in the market currently starting form hosted eCommerce applications like Shopify, Volusion, Bigcommerce, Squarespace and so on….
And other third party software’s like opencart, creloaded, concrete, zencart etc…
The software’s have been properly tested and issues like these don’t surface, of course I will NOT say that there won’t be bugs, yes there will be BUT not glaring bugs like these.
Bugs are often spotted quickly and patches are released and upgrades are done immediately.
Conclusion: If you have a good team of developers including QC people then go ahead and have a custom built application in PHP, ASP.net, Laravel, Django(phython), Coldfusion, ROR etc…
If not then depending on ready available software’s which are discussed above will be a very good idea!
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