WordPress to Laravel, and a point of sale that matches the shop floor
Book Corner is a custom e-commerce platform built for Pakistan's growing book retail market. We developed this online bookstore using Laravel for the SEO-optimised storefront and Ember.js for the admin panel and point of sale system. The platform integrates with physical retail stores, supports multiple payment options including cash on delivery, and keeps inventory synchronised in real time. It is a legacy modernisation project: a struggling WordPress site rebuilt as a custom platform.
Visit BookCorner
- Industry
- E-commerce / Retail
- Duration
- 8 years, ongoing
- Support
- 2 years
- Location
- Jhelum, Pakistan
- Load
- 2.2M requests / week
What they were carrying
Book Corner, an established book publisher in Pakistan, had technical debt that was stunting their growth. The legacy WordPress site suffered from slow page loads, frequent crashes and security vulnerabilities. It lacked proper inventory management, had no point of sale integration with the physical stores, and an admin panel that was close to unusable.
The retail side is what made this urgent. A bookshop with physical stores and an online storefront that do not share inventory is running two businesses that disagree with each other about what is in stock.
The migration
We executed a complete WordPress to Laravel migration, building a custom e-commerce platform from the ground up. The architecture separates concerns: Laravel powers the SEO-optimised frontend, while Ember.js drives the admin dashboard and the point of sale application.
We implemented a distributed infrastructure with media assets on Digital Ocean Spaces, application servers on AWS, and a dedicated MySQL database server.
Point of sale, joined to the website
The custom development included real-time inventory synchronisation between online and physical stores, a complete point of sale integration, and enterprise-grade security. We built features for book categorisation, author management and multi-location stock tracking.
The Ember.js admin panel gives staff one interface for managing orders, customers and inventory across all retail locations, which removed the manual data entry that previously sat between the shop floor and the website.
Results
Page load times dropped from over 8 seconds to under 2. The point of sale system eliminated manual reconciliation between online and physical stores.
What it carries today: around 2.2 million requests and 353 GB served in a week, with single days peaking above 430,000 requests. Underneath that sit roughly 133,000 monthly active users and 439,000 page views, about 4,000 people a day, comfortably above Google’s own median for the Books and Literature category.
Almost all of it is served from origin rather than from a cache, so that load is being absorbed by the application itself rather than deflected by an edge.
Within two years of launch, Book Corner’s revenue grew to eight figures with a reported 550 percent return on the investment.
Screens
Client feedback
The 550% ROI speaks for itself.
Working with AALA IT Solutions on our WordPress to Laravel migration has been transformative for our business. Their expertise in custom e-commerce development and Ember.js completely changed how we operate. The new platform is blazing fast, the POS integration with our physical stores works flawlessly, and our team loves the admin dashboard.
Our customers enjoy a seamless shopping experience whether online or in-person. AALA IT Solutions took the time to understand our retail operations and delivered a solution that exceeded our expectations.
Ammar ShahidCEO, BookCorner
What next
Running something like this?
The engineers who built this are the ones you would work with. Tell us what you have and we will tell you plainly whether it is work we should take.