Development of a Real-Time Vendor-Consumer Communication Platform for eCommerce

The client’s website lacks real-time information on stock levels at various vendor locations, making it difficult for customers to coordinate in-person pickups. This deficiency results in missed sales opportunities and suboptimal customer experiences. The current communication channels—text messaging and online forms—are inefficient and costly to maintain, hindering operational scalability and responsiveness.

A mid-sized online retail company with extensive vendor partnerships seeking to enhance customer engagement and operational efficiency.

• Create a scalable, cost-effective real-time chat platform facilitating direct communication between customers and vendors.
• Enhance customer experience by providing immediate access to stock availability and pickup options.
• Reduce operational costs associated with existing communication methods.
• Enable multiple vendor agents to collaborate within chat conversations to ensure prompt and accurate responses.
• Implement features for multimedia sharing, conversation archives, group chats, polls, and voice messaging to support comprehensive customer interactions.
• Deploy a secure, scalable solution supporting over 1,000 vendor agents with minimized latency and high reliability.

• Customer-initiated chat query submission via a web widget integrated seamlessly into the eCommerce platform.
• Real-time communication with support for multimedia file sharing.
• User registration and identity management for customer inquiries.
• Multi-vendor chat rooms enabling multiple agent participation per conversation.
• Admin panel for vendor communication management, monitoring, and oversight.
• Conversation history tracking and archiving for future reference.
• Customer and vendor polls to gather feedback within chats.
• Voice messaging capability to support verbal communication.

• Vendor inventory management systems to access real-time stock data
• User authentication and identity verification systems
• Cloud storage for multimedia message files
• Monitoring and analytics tools for system performance tracking

• System must support over 1,000 concurrent vendor agents with minimal latency
• High security standards to ensure communication privacy and data protection
• Scalable architecture supporting future growth and feature expansion
• Reliable uptime with a target of 99.9% availability
• Responsive design ensuring usability across devices

The implementation of a real-time vendor-consumer chat platform is expected to significantly improve customer engagement and satisfaction by enabling immediate access to stock and pickup information. It aims to reduce communication costs dramatically—comparable to the expense of supporting over 1,000 vendor agents—and increase sales opportunities by minimizing missed inquiries. Overall, the system is designed to streamline vendor operations, enhance operational efficiency, and support scalable growth with high reliability.