The Parrot — B2B Portal

Parrot Hosiery Factory, a 40-year-old Kolkata-based hosiery manufacturer, had been managing 120+ wholesale accounts entirely through phone calls and WhatsApp messages. Every week, dozens of dealers across India would send orders via text messages — often incomplete, unclear, or conflicting. The office team would manually transcribe these into spreadsheets, calculate pricing based on volume tiers, coordinate with the warehouse for dispatch, and then chase payments through yet another set of phone calls.

The result was predictable chaos. Orders got mixed up. Shipments went to the wrong addresses. Payment reconciliation was a monthly nightmare that consumed the accounts team for days. During peak season (Diwali, wedding months), the system would buckle entirely — orders would get lost in WhatsApp threads, dealers would double-order out of frustration, and the factory floor had zero visibility into what was actually needed.

Jhalak Rathi, who had taken over operations from the previous generation, recognised that the business couldn't scale beyond its current capacity without digitising its B2B ordering process. But enterprise B2B platforms were priced for corporations with lakhs in monthly budgets — not a family-run hosiery factory in Burrabazar that needed something practical, affordable, and simple enough for dealers who had never used anything beyond WhatsApp.

We designed and built a full-stack B2B ordering portal from the ground up using Next.js for the frontend and NestJS (Node.js) for the backend, with PostgreSQL as the primary database and Redis for session management and caching.

The platform has two distinct interfaces. The Dealer Portal gives each of Parrot Hosiery's 120+ wholesale accounts a personalised dashboard where they can browse the live product catalogue, place bulk orders with volume-based pricing automatically applied, track dispatch status in real time, and view their complete order and payment history. The Admin Dashboard gives the factory team a command centre — live order queue, inventory levels synced with the warehouse, dispatch management with automated label generation, payment reconciliation with outstanding balance tracking, and analytics on ordering patterns by dealer, region, and season.

The catalogue system was built with Elasticsearch powering search and filtering across hundreds of product variants (vest types, sizes, pack quantities), making it fast for dealers to find and reorder their regular items. We implemented a role-based authentication system so dealers see only their negotiated pricing, while the admin team has full visibility.

Inventory management was connected to the factory floor through a simple stock update interface that warehouse staff use on tablets. When stock runs low, the system automatically flags it and prevents overselling — a problem that had plagued the WhatsApp-era ordering.

Payments were integrated through Razorpay for digital settlements, but we also built a manual payment recording system (for bank transfers and cash) with automated receipt generation. The WhatsApp Business API was integrated for automated order confirmations, dispatch notifications, and payment reminders — meeting dealers where they already were.

The entire platform was deployed on AWS (EC2 for compute, S3 for assets, CloudFront for CDN) with automated backups and monitoring.