Online Bookstore Portal Case Study

A Singapore-based client wanted to scale their bookstore website into a pan-Southeast Asia platform but their existing system generated errors when entering new markets. The key challenges were: (1) enabling full-text search across 15 million books with results in under 2 seconds; (2) supporting alternative word order in search (e.g., 'Harry Potter' and 'Potter Harry' both returning the same result); (3) building a multi-tenant SQL database supporting Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia from a single MS SQL Server instance; and (4) running daily price updates based on the latest USD exchange rate with zero downtime.

We revamped the database and back-end to eliminate recurring errors, integrating the client-provided frontend HTML with a .NET Core + Repository Pattern backend using Razor Pages. Full-text search was implemented in SQL Server to handle 15M+ titles with sub-2-second response times. A multi-tenant database architecture was designed to serve three countries from a single MS SQL instance. SSIS handles daily price recalculations with zero downtime. We also integrated four payment gateways — Opn Payments (Omise), Midtrans, Razer, and PayPal — each specific to the relevant country market.