How Cajoo Migrated From Shopify in 4 weeks with Hasura Cloud

Cajoo needed to manage different stock quantities per warehouse, which Shopify struggled with. To work around it, they included the warehouse stock information in the product meta field and left the client to handle the filtering. But as the number of warehouses and products increased, fetching product data became cumbersome and slow, leading to slower app response time and a poor user experience.

Cajoo's team needed to stay lean and iterate quickly on new features. The engineers needed to be flexible enough to work on and understand all layers of their system — database, backend, integrations, and the frontend web UI.

The Cajoo team needed features which the Shopify API did not natively offer. In addition, they wanted to avoid the rate-limiting on Shopify APIs, which caused their application to struggle, especially during peak periods.

The Cajoo team wanted to move away from overreliance on third-party proprietary software. Building in-house order management and warehouse inventory software meant they had complete control of the technology supply chain.

Hasura's intuitive user interface and documentation made it easy to set up and connect their Postgres database, making their data instantly accessible over GraphQL APIs. Hasura also took care of their API data layer, allowing them to focus on architecture and custom business logic while saving them development and maintenance time.

Hasura offered the flexibility and control Cajoo was seeking, as it is open-source and can be run locally or in the cloud. It can also connect to a private database instance so Cajoo can essentially control its data and avoid third-party vendor lock-ins.

Hasura provided built-in security and authorization capabilities, which allowed for a role and user-based authorization down to the individual column and row level. Having this feature out-of-the-box saved Cajoo development time and ensured security was baked right into every application's data layer.

Hasura provided out-of-the-box support for subscriptions and aggregates. Cajoo could implement real-time delivery tracking with subscriptions, so the client's screen gets updated anytime there's a change to the order status. Having aggregates automatically generated with the GraphQL API meant the backend could easily carry out queries such as order counting and filtering with a single line of text.

Cajoo's infrastructure relied heavily on events such as notifying the client via email when an order was placed and notifying warehouses via Slack to let them know the new order was to be fulfilled. Hasura offered a reliable and easy way to create event triggers on specified tables and invoke webhooks (like listening to Stripes API for payment success) to carry out business logic.  

Cajoo also utilized Hasura Event Triggers and webhooks to provide real-time integrations to the multiple AWS Lambda functions they're using.

Cajoo saw improved performance on their client's applications after implementing Hasura. The client's data fetching time improved from 10 seconds to load all products in a category to less than 1 second, which greatly improved customer experience and kept customers from bouncing off a page that took too long to load.

Hasura's simplified GraphQL data fetching architecture made it easy to add new features in less time. Cajoo was able to migrate their ecommerce backend from Shopify in less than four weeks and roll out their custom delivery tracking application in less than a month because of the speed at which Hasura helped them operate.

Cajoo experienced significant cost savings with Hasura. Monthly infrastructure costs went from over $2,000 to just $100 with Hasura (about a 95% reduction in cost).

Hasura enabled Cajoo to move to a cleaner and more reliable application architecture. They could migrate to a serverless architecture using AWS Lambda with a one-on-one relationship to Hasura event triggers, helping them encapsulate their business logic and keep it separate from the delivery mechanism. Moving to Hasura gave Cajoo more flexibility with its technical architecture, allowing them to quickly adapt to changing technology and interfaces.

Hasura enabled Cajoo to quickly replace their third-party warehousing and Courier delivery software with in-house custom software, which gave them more control of their tech stack.