Gentle Park is one of Bangladesh's largest e-commerce brands, with a second storefront serving the UAE. Between them the two sites handle roughly 40M requests and 150k unique visitors a month.
I joined as a frontend developer. The brief was a UI build. What it turned into was a question of whether the business could keep growing without its hosting bill growing at the same rate, and the answer came out of the frontend rather than the infrastructure.
Nobody set out to cut hosting costs. It started with two ordinary complaints.
The first was the invoice. Traffic was climbing month over month and the bill was climbing with it, on a line item nobody had budgeted to grow. For a retail business, an infrastructure cost that scales with visitors is a cost that punishes you for succeeding.
The second was the phone in the customer's hand. Most people shopping here are on a mid-range Android over mobile data. A page that feels instant on office wifi can take eight seconds on a weak connection in Dhaka, and the customer is gone before the product image loads. Payload weight is not a vanity metric in this market. It is the difference between a sale and a bounce.
Both complaints turned out to have the same cause.
Every request was making the server build a page from scratch, including pages that had not changed in days. A product listing that 50,000 people looked at was rendered 50,000 times. The hosting plan bills on compute, so the business was paying per view for work that only needed doing once.
The same architecture was shipping more JavaScript and heavier images than a mid-range phone wanted to deal with, because nothing had been tuned for the network those customers were actually on.
And with a UAE storefront coming, the fastest path was a fork: copy the codebase, swap the currency and catalogue, maintain two. That would have doubled the cost of every fix from then on.
