A full e-commerce platform built solo across two frameworks.
Gharpaluwa is a consumer e-commerce product for the Nepali market, owned by Aakah Nayaju. The project required building real-time messaging, a ranked social feed, and an AI recommendation engine from scratch.
Three high-complexity systems had to ship together from a single engineer.
Background
Live chat, feed ranking, and AI personalisation are typically team-level problems. Each requires separate infrastructure, different runtime concerns, and significant iteration time. Building them simultaneously, solo, meant every architecture decision had to hold across all three.
No shortcuts on the hard parts.
No platform existed. Each feature started from zero.
A working product with three live complex systems.
Django + Laravel, seamlessly bridged.
Architecture Decision
Splitting responsibilities across Django and Laravel avoided monolith bloat while keeping the React frontend unified through Inertia.js. The tradeoff was cross-framework coordination overhead. That was acceptable. Rewriting one framework later would not have been.
Live Chat
Built on WebSockets with Django Channels. Designed for concurrent sessions without polling overhead. Message state persists across sessions with minimal latency under realistic Nepali network conditions.
Social Feed
A ranking algorithm scores posts by recency, engagement rate, and user affinity. The feed is not chronological. It surfaces relevant products and community content based on purchase history and interaction signals.
AI Shopping Agent
A personalised recommendation agent built on top of user behaviour data. It surfaces product suggestions inside the browsing flow, not as a separate widget. The model updates on session data, not batch jobs.
Inertia.js created friction between Django and Laravel routing.
Shared session state and a unified API contract resolved it.
A full platform shipped on time with three live production systems.
Systems Live
Live chat, social feed ranking, and the AI shopping agent all launched together. No deferred features. Each system runs in production at gharpaluwa.com.np
Build Time
Delivered in six months by a single developer. The dual-framework architecture added complexity upfront but reduced rework during integration.
“Nben took three problems that most teams would split across separate sprints and delivered them together. The AI agent alone changed how users move through the platform. The chat made it feel like a real marketplace.”
Aakah Nayaju
Founder
Gharpaluwa Pet Solution
Two frameworks only work together if the contract between them is strict.
Project Team
Nben Malla, Full Stack Developer. Aakah Nayaju, Founder and Client.
