Shopverse: multi-shop commerce platform for Indian sellers

Shopverse is a software-as-a-service platform for small Indian retailers. Each business gets its own storefronts (with a section-based design editor), stock that’s shared across warehouses, orders and delivery, returns and refunds, GST-compliant invoices, discounts, analytics, and payments by card, UPI or cash on delivery. Shoppers can use the storefront in English or Hindi. Behind the scenes there’s a background job queue, rate limiting, error tracking, encrypted nightly backups, and an accessibility audit that runs on every change.

Small Indian sellers often run several brands or shops out of shared warehouses. They manage it all with spreadsheets, WhatsApp and a marketplace or two. Generic e-commerce tools don’t fit how they work: - Cash on delivery dominates, and fake COD orders are expensive. - Every invoice has to follow GST rules. - Stock is split across warehouses, and some of it has batch numbers, expiry dates or serial numbers. -Many shoppers prefer Hindi.

I wanted one platform that handles all of this correctly, not just a nice-looking storefront.

• The database is the source of truth. Every business rule (holding stock, numbering invoices, return windows, permissions) lives in PostgreSQL functions, protected by row-level security and recorded in an audit log. The rules hold no matter which screen or API calls them, and each one is covered by a SQL test suite.
• India-first details:
• Cash-on-delivery orders are confirmed with an email code, which cuts down fake orders.
• Couriers hand parcels over only against a delivery code.
• GST is calculated per state (CGST and SGST, or IGST), with numbered credit notes for refunds.
• Shoppers can pay by UPI.
• The storefront is fully translated into Hindi.
• Sellers control their storefront through a section-based design editor with a live preview, draft and publish, and undo.
• Payments happen on the shop’s own page, using Stripe’s secure card fields styled from the shop’s design tokens.
• Production hardening:
• Emails and webhooks go through a background job queue with retries.
• Rate limits are applied before requests reach the app.
• Errors are tracked and grouped, with Sentry and OpenTelemetry tracing as options.
• Encrypted backups have a written, tested restore runbook.
• Testing like a real team: browser tests drive the real sign-in screens, reading codes from a test mailbox. When the live payment flow ran into a problem, each one became a check in a small Stripe stand-in used by the tests, so it can’t silently come back.

A working multi-tenant platform: a seller can sign up, create shops and warehouses, list products, take cash-on-delivery or online orders, ship them with delivery codes, handle returns and refunds, and file GST reports.

The test suite paid off before launch. Writing the browser tests exposed a privacy bug: when a shopper checked out with a new email but a phone number already on another customer’s record, their order confirmation and delivery code went to the other person’s email. The fix came with database tests that fail on the old behaviour.

The whole flow, from order to delivery to refund, runs in CI on every change, along with the accessibility audit.