We designed and developed a complete digital ecosystem for Distacart — a feature-rich cross-border e-commerce website paired with a high-performance mobile app — enabling 500,000+ Indian products to reach customers across 40+ countries with no hidden charges, customs duties included, and a seamless multi-currency shopping experience.
Distacart (now Dista), founded in 2017 by Kiran Kotla, is a trusted cross-border e-commerce platform connecting the global Indian diaspora with authentic Indian products, including Ayurvedic medicines, groceries, fashion, beauty, and baby care. With 500,000+ products, 5,000+ verified brands, delivery to 40+ countries, and 72,000+ customer reviews, the company required a scalable digital ecosystem.
This included a high-performance e-commerce website with international pricing, customs-inclusive checkout, rewards, and seamless shopping, along with a cross-platform mobile app offering app-exclusive deals, order tracking, and a smooth shopping experience across iOS and Android for customers worldwide.
3-4 People
Dedicated specialists including a UI/UX designer, frontend and backend developers, and a project manager — working in parallel across both the website and the mobile app.
4-5 Weeks
Design
Dev
Test
Launch
We designed and developed Distacart’s complete digital commerce infrastructure across two platforms:
Website: Custom e-commerce platform with a massive multi-category product catalog (Wellness, Beauty, Food, Fashion, Baby & Kids, Spirituality, Footwear, Home & Kitchen), multi-currency checkout across 40+ countries, customs duties included in pricing, rewards program, deals and offers, order tracking, and a brand/category discovery experience built for the global Indian diaspora.
Mobile App: Cross-platform iOS and Android app delivering the full Distacart shopping experience on mobile — with exclusive app-only discounts, one-tap checkout, real-time order tracking, push notifications for deals, and a fast, intuitive UI built for frequent shoppers.
Building a cross-border e-commerce platform for Indian products is fundamentally more complex than a standard online store. Three core challenges had to be solved:
With 500,000+ products across 10+ categories, 5,000+ brands, and multiple weight/size/pack variants per product, the platform needed a scalable catalog architecture that could handle enormous data volumes while keeping the browsing experience fast, filterable, and intuitive for customers searching by brand, category, concern, or product type.
Distacart's key differentiator is "no hidden charges — customs duties and tariffs included." This required building a pricing and checkout system that correctly handles multi-currency display (40+ currencies), international tax and duty calculations, and transparent final pricing — all without surprising customers at checkout or during delivery.
The Indian diaspora is a mobile-first audience. A significant portion of Distacart's customer base shops on mobile, expects app-only deals, and needs real-time order tracking for international shipments. A dedicated, high-performance mobile app was essential — not optional.
With 500,000+ products spanning Wellness (Ayurveda, Homeopathy, Unani), Beauty & Personal Care, Indian Food (Sweets, Snacks, Pickles, Ghee, Millets), Fashion (Women, Men, Handloom Sarees), Baby & Kids, Spirituality, Home & Kitchen, and more — the catalog architecture was the most critical engineering challenge.
We built a deeply structured category and sub-category system with brand-level, type-level, and concern-level filtering (e.g., “Shop by Hair Concern: Hair Fall & Thinning / Dandruff / Dry & Frizzy Hair”). MongoDB’s flexible document model handled the wide variance in product attributes across categories, while Redis caching ensured fast product retrieval even under heavy catalog load.
Distacart’s brand promise — customs duties and tariffs included — required a custom pricing engine. The system correctly calculates and bundles international duties into the displayed price, so customers in the USA, UK, UAE, Canada, Australia, and 35+ other countries see the true final price upfront. Multi-currency display (40+ currencies) was implemented with real-time conversion, ensuring every customer shops in their local currency with no checkout surprises.
The React Native mobile app was built to deliver the complete Distacart experience on mobile — with fast catalog browsing, search, brand discovery, multi-currency checkout, exclusive app-only discounts (e.g., “Flat 12% Off — Use Code: APPFIRST”), and real-time international order tracking. The Node.js backend serves the product catalog and order data via optimized APIs, with Redis ensuring fast response times even for large category queries. GitHub Actions automates the CI/CD pipeline, keeping the app stable and deployable across iOS and Android with every update.
A dedicated rewards program and deals engine was built to power Distacart’s customer retention strategy — including category-wide discounts (10% OFF Fashion), flash deals with countdown timers, Dista’s Picks curated collections, and Best Bargains sections — all managed dynamically without manual page updates.
Full Distacart catalog available on iOS and Android.
Exclusive app-only discounts and promo codes.
One-tap add to cart and fast checkout.
Multi-currency support matching the website experience.
Real-time international shipment tracking
Push notifications for deals, offers, and order updates.
Fast catalog browsing powered by Redis-cached APIs.
QR code app download flow from the website.
Automatic updates via GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline.
Both products were delivered within the 2–3 week timeline, production-ready and fully integrated:
This project delivered a production-ready, globally scalable cross-border e-commerce ecosystem for Distacart — a custom website capable of serving 500,000+ Indian products to customers in 40+ countries, paired with a React Native mobile app backed by a Node.js, MongoDB, and AWS infrastructure. By solving the unique challenges of cross-border pricing, massive catalog architecture, and a mobile-first diaspora audience, we enabled Distacart to become one of the most trusted names in Indian e-commerce worldwide — delivering authentic Indian products to NRIs wherever they are.
We built two interconnected digital products: a high-performance e-commerce website capable of serving 500,000+ Indian products across 40+ countries with customs-included pricing, and a cross-platform mobile app for iOS and Android delivering the full Distacart shopping experience with exclusive app discounts and real-time order tracking.
A custom pricing engine was built to bundle international customs duties and tariffs into the displayed product price for each country. Customers across the USA, UK, UAE, Canada, Australia, and 35+ other countries see the true final price upfront in their local currency — no surprises at checkout or during delivery. Real-time currency conversion handles the display across 40+ supported currencies.
A focused team of 3–4 specialists worked in parallel — the designer handled both website UI and app screens simultaneously, while developers split across the frontend catalog experience and the React Native + Node.js backend. Clear scope from day one, a component-based architecture across both platforms, and daily communication kept everything on track. The cross-border pricing engine and catalog architecture were prioritized as the most complex components, with dedicated testing across multiple country configurations before launch.
We built a deeply structured category architecture using MongoDB's flexible document model to handle the wide variance in product attributes across 10+ categories and 100+ sub-categories. Redis caching was implemented to serve fast product search and catalog browsing results even under high concurrent load — essential for a half-million product database with thousands of active shoppers.
The app is built with React Native for cross-platform iOS and Android delivery. The backend runs on Node.js with MongoDB for the product catalog and order data. AWS EC2 hosts the server, AWS S3 handles product image storage, and Redis provides fast caching for catalog queries. GitHub Actions automates the CI/CD pipeline and Docker ensures consistent containerized deployments — making the infrastructure reliable and scalable as Distacart continues to grow.
