The Purple Turtles, India’s premier destination for curated lighting and home decor, faced a classic scaling problem. As they expanded their physical retail footprint across Bangalore, their digital infrastructure couldn’t keep pace with their real-time inventory needs.
Phase 1: Moving Beyond the Limits of Self-Hosting
Initially, the brand operated on WooCommerce. As the catalog grew and traffic increased, the site’s performance became a bottleneck.
Our team spent significant resources trying to “optimize” our way out of the problem:
- Infrastructure Overhaul: Deploying high-performance VPS environments.
- Server-Side Tuning: Deep Nginx configuration and object caching.
- Content Delivery: Layering complex CDN setups to shave off milliseconds.
Ultimately, we realized that the overhead of maintaining a self-hosted environment was distracting from the core mission. We made the strategic decision to migrate The Purple Turtles to Shopify, moving from “managing servers” to “managing growth.”
Phase 2: The Tally ERP Integration Challenge
While Shopify solved the frontend performance issues, the backend “Race Condition” remained. Tally ERP – a desktop-based legacy system – served as their source of truth for inventory.
Because products were often one-off pieces, a sale in a Bangalore store needed to be reflected online immediately. Without this, the brand faced frequent order cancellations and customer frustration.
The Technical Hurdle: Parsing 400,000 Lines of XML
Tally ERP isn’t cloud-native. It uses a localized, XML-based API typically restricted to a local port (9000). To bridge this to Shopify, we had to engineer a custom solution:
- The Middleware: We built a custom Windows Service (originally .NET 3.1, now upgraded to .NET 6) that sits directly on the Tally server.
- The Data Load: Every 5 minutes, this service fetches a Stock Summary. The challenge? The report is a non-standard XML file exceeding 400,000 lines.
- Cloud Processing: Our service pushes this massive XML to an internet-hosted server where we parse the data, filter it by specific godowns (warehouses), and map it to Shopify product variants.
- The Sync: Inventory levels are updated via the Shopify API, ensuring the “Race Condition” is neutralized.
Why This Matters for Modern Retail
The result is a seamless loop between physical stores and the digital storefront. By moving to a managed platform (Shopify) and building a custom bridge for their legacy data (Tally), The Purple Turtles achieved:
- Operational Efficiency: No more manual stock updates multiple times a day.
- Customer Trust: Real-time availability means no more “out of stock” phone calls after a purchase.
- Scalability: A system built on .NET 6 that handles half a million lines of data every few minutes without breaking a sweat.
