Ekuep — GCC's Largest Commercial Kitchen Equipment Marketplace

Context & Goals

Led architecture and full-stack development on Ekuep, the GCC's largest online B2B/B2C marketplace for commercial kitchen and restaurant equipment, serving Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Oman, and Kuwait with AI-powered search, a loyalty programme, and enterprise account management for clients including Burger King, Subway, and AlShaya Group.

Constraints & Challenges

Commercial kitchen equipment procurement across the GCC was dominated by offline showrooms and manual quotation processes, leaving F&B entrepreneurs and enterprise franchise chains with no scalable way to source and purchase equipment online. As Ekuep grew into a multi-country B2B/B2C platform serving clients like Burger King, Subway, and AlShaya Group across five countries, the platform faced critical bottlenecks: search responses averaging 5 seconds on a large SKU catalogue, siloed sales data disconnected from the e-commerce pipeline, and a monolithic backend unable to sustain growth without reliability issues.

Solution & Approach

Led architecture and development of the platform's core systems within a cross-functional agile team, using Vue.js, Livewire, Alpine.js, and Laravel APIs, with React.js and Next.js for key commerce surfaces. Designed relational database schemas for Users, Roles, Orders, and Permissions with optimised indexing and query tuning to support high-traffic search and content workflows. Replaced slow search with Algolia and Meilisearch for full-text and faceted filtering across product categories, prices, and availability. Decomposed the monolithic backend into microservice-based APIs to improve scalability and resilience, and integrated Microsoft Dynamics AX and Pipedrive CRM to connect the B2B sales pipeline directly with the e-commerce platform.

Delivered a high-performance, enterprise-grade marketplace with sub-second product search, a structured B2B customer portal with enhanced pricing access, CRM-integrated lead tracking with 99% data accuracy, and an admin dashboard for content moderation and user-generated data management. The microservices architecture reduced platform downtime by 35% and scaled to support a growing GCC-wide catalogue. Ekuep went on to win the B2B Ecommerce Website of the Year Award three consecutive times at Seamless Middle East Tech Awards — the first online commercial kitchen equipment store in Saudi Arabia, and the largest in the region.

Technology Stack

Results & Impact

Project Links