Overview of the trading platform TetraMall

I had to deal with the creation of online stores several times. Basically, thanks to requests for help from friends and acquaintances, who have no idea about business on the Web and want to figure it out. You know, this type of people of the old school, who necessarily go for advice to "their", despite the fact that "their" specialize not entirely in the desired field of IT. Well, it was necessary to penetrate. The projects of new-born Internet entrepreneurs have always been different, with radically different tasks and goals. Something has been working successfully to this day, but much of it quickly ceased to exist due to certain reasons, without going beyond the scope of exploratory indulgence.

One of the projects came from my father's classmate, who has his own business - a small network of stores and warehouses, i.e. targeting b2b and b2c. And at first glance, his company has a normal website, it is possible to purchase goods on it. Well, as normal, 6 years ago it was made to order, on it the goods could be thrown into the basket, after which the duty manager received a notification and “manually” served the client. If you are lucky, the state of the warehouse corresponded to the availability of goods on the storefront at 80 percent. And this owner was greatly interested in the question about the possibility of connecting to the TetraMall platform, which was unknown to me or him, which he was strongly advised. Since I did not find any references to it in Habré, I want to open a new thread of discussions and share my first acquaintance with this “beast” and impressions, in many respects, perhaps, subjective.

So, what is TetraMall.

This is the operator of online trading, which provides a platform for creating an online store and software for synchronizing goods with 1C, ready-made cash acceptance, logistics organization and, of course, technical support. There is no charge for logging into the system and being there, the system lives for a percentage of sales (from 2% to 8%). By the way, this was largely the reason why my friend became interested in her.
To connect to the system, you must enter into an agreement. To do this, a letter is written on the electronic, which is listed on their website, and after a short correspondence, the company's specialists call back. All subtleties are discussed with them. For me personally, this approach is a lack of service, although not fatal, since it raises the threshold of entry for such conservatives as in this case.
After the long-awaited login and password were received, we proceeded to the main action - loading the product onto the site. This was surprisingly quick and non-traumatic. Basically, everything was set on setting 1C.
By the way, speaking of logistics, the company's promise should be noted: the organization of the delivery of goods throughout Russia by the forces of the partners of the system, thereby reducing its total cost. And another plus - the calculation of the cost of the goods goes along with the delivery. What is very useful for the customer convenience, because he immediately sees the final cost.

A little about the technical side of the issue.

As I was told in technical support, the system was written in advance under hi-load with scaling, with no brakes when maintaining a database of hundreds of millions of goods, for simultaneous synchronization with tens of thousands of partners, with similar solutions used in facebook, google. Instances are broken in accordance with the load on the suppliers of goods. As far as promises correspond to reality, while it is difficult to judge, but it inspires hope.

TetraMall has a real-time synchronization mechanism with residuals from 1C using the TetraMall Server installation, an application that, after being installed on the partner’s side of the system, hangs in memory and performs the simplest actions to transfer modified residues and accepts commands to reserve goods in 1C. The application sends a request to 1C every second, and sends a signal about the state or new data on balances to the main TetraMall server. Communication with external Internet access is only one-way, which does not affect the firewall configured by the partner and, accordingly, the vulnerability from the outside. Connection goes through the standard COM interface provided by 1C itself. When working through a COM connection, TetraMall server works on behalf of an individual user who needs to be created in 1C and set up the rights to access the metadata objects necessary for uploading, therefore only data authorized by the partner is transmitted, thereby preventing leakage of confidential data.

Competitors.

There was not much time or energy to go deep into this system. As I said, the final choice of this system is the decision of the business owner, who apparently had his own reasons, despite his initial skepticism. However, at my first acquaintance, I could single out the following from existing platforms in the Russian Federation as competitors: Wikimart , Ozon and, with a certain stretch, Yandex.Market .
However, this competition is also quite tight, due to the fact that many of the tasks of these systems are different. If the first two are Internet counters with a certain set of products, combined into a common system, then TetraMall, rather, offers a separate online store with the ability to enter the common base and use common services. As for Yandex.Market, it’s hard to call it an independent online hypermarket, because it offers familiarity with the product, but in order to purchase it, go to the store’s website.
From the global point of view, TetraMall is almost the complete equivalent of Amazon.com and Ebay auction. True, the latter very much delayed their full-fledged access to the Russian market, so it’s too early to compare them with TetraMall.

Total

The TetraMall system looks pretty. She may not be very well known, but judging by the information on the Internet, she is gaining popularity. It is sharpened primarily for those who have their own trading network or production, because participation in the system is a prerequisite for the goods to be in stock or in the store. However, it can also be used as an additional sales platform for your product.