Cepte Perakende

About the app

Cepte Perakende was not a marketplace. It was an e-commerce app selling products we had found cheaply or could source ourselves at wholesale prices, where the entire inventory belonged to us. There were no third-party sellers; that removed the burden of seller management, but in exchange it made stock accuracy entirely our responsibility.

In an e-commerce app, the most painful mistake is selling a product you do not have. So stock was read from a single source everywhere — on the product card, in the cart and at the payment step; the user could see the current stock count even inside the cart. In the same place I also showed product popularity — how many people had favourited it, how many had added it to their cart — because the second most painful thing is a user who cannot tell whether the item they want is about to sell out.

The least talked about but most time-consuming part of the job was payments and regulation. Alongside single payment there were 3, 6, 9 and 12 installment options, and the total for each plan was calculated separately including interest. On top of that came the preliminary information form, the distance selling contract, the right of withdrawal and the return shipping flow, all required by Turkish Consumer Protection Law no. 6502 and the Distance Selling Regulation. It does not look flashy in a portfolio, but this layer is exactly what separates a real commerce app from a toy.

I also put separate effort into reducing pre-purchase questions: per-product FAQs, a user question-and-answer section, ratings and reviews, fast delivery and free shipping badges, and recommendations from the same category. Whatever question comes to mind before buying a product, the answer had to be findable without leaving the page.

To be honest, the commercial side of the product — sourcing, operations, marketing — never got where I wanted it. But the app itself stood up from end to end: from catalogue to cart, from installment payments to order tracking and returns, I built the entire shopping journey on my own. It was the most comprehensive flow I had written to date.

The app is not live today. The reason was not a technical problem or the app itself — I shifted my focus to other projects and running an e-commerce business at this scale at the same time was not possible. A product with inventory, sourcing and operations needs daily attention long after the code is finished. Cepte Perakende showed me that an app being technically ready and a business standing on its own feet are two completely different things.