CameraLK Photo Video Digital Cameras, Photography, Camcorders
I joined this project in 2020, just before the pandemic reached Sri Lanka. Due to limited company resources, another UI/UX developer and I built the entire application from scratch through its first release, after which we transferred it to a development team.
As the core developer and tech lead, I built the system using Laravel 6, the latest version available at the time. The backend was developed using Laravel Nova.
The system employs a hybrid architecture (SPA and Blade), as Livewire and Inertia weren't available then. It uses API services integrated with Vue.js components to manage 90% of the client-side processing.
This architecture provided users with a seamless purchasing experience, and the CameraLK website won an award from Sony for the fastest responsive website in Southeast Asia in 2023
The database design follows a standard e-commerce structure but includes extensive customisations to meet specific business requirements. With nearly 100,000 customers and 3,000 daily visitors, the system uses Redis caching alongside the database layer to optimise loading speeds.
With their previous Magento website, monthly revenue was less than 100k LKR, mainly due to poor user experience and slow performance. After we released the new version, the company's monthly revenue increased to over 10 million LKR.
CameraLK is one of the best search engine-optimized websites in Sri Lanka. On the Sri Lankan version of Google (www.google.lk), any keyword search related to cameras or photography prominently displays CameraLK in the results. This success is mainly due to my implementation of SEO optimisations and structures, including RDFA, JSON-LD, and schemas, which account for 80% of these results.
**Search Demo**
For the website search, I initially used ElasticSearch with a Dockerized approach. However, due to high costs and difficulties managing multiple containers, we switched to Algolia, which offered an attractive package for CLK's product list. After the product list grew to over 15,000 items, Algolia became too expensive. When CLK requested an alternative, I recommended Meilisearch—a free solution—and set it up on an EC2 instance.
The new Meilisearch instance featured comprehensive search capabilities, which led to CameraLK being recognised as having one of the best search engines. The system could search for all product details, including names, serial numbers, SKUs, product codes, and specifications.