Client

The client is a provider of software solutions to the retail, manufacturing, and foodservice industries. Based in Switzerland, the organization delivers services primarily to the US and European countries. As of today, mobile applications developed by the company have over one million users worldwide.

Background

The organization aimed to build an e-commerce fashion marketplace to help local retailers attract consumers, promote their goods, and earn profit.
To help merchants automate business processes and increase sales, the web system had to provide features such as data analytics and visualization, order management, as well as inventory tracking. However, the client lacked expertise in custom web development.
Cooperating with Arateg, the company wanted to build a web marketplace platform that would match local sellers of clothes, shoes, and accessories with consumers across Switzerland and nearby European countries.

Project goal

The primary goal was to create an online fashion marketplace that would allow vendors to manage inventory and incoming orders via the website. Since the platform would assist sellers in increasing the volume of sales, it was essential to enable them to analyze consumer behavior for identifying the most popular goods, lifetime value, etc., as well as tracking other metrics.

Project duration

5.5 months

Team

3 frontend developers, 3 backend developers, 2 UI/UX designers, a quality assurance engineer, project manager, business analyst.

Technologies

JavaScript, Golang, Python, Django, Flask, Elasticsearch, AWS, Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Shield, React, Redux, Redux-Saga, Storybook, SVG, RabbitMQ, Redis, Memcached, PostgreSQL, Stripe API, Braintree API, Fulfil.IO REST API, Mixpanel.

Solution

Our marketplace development team started out by gathering and analyzing the company’s requirements. During this stage, we audited a technical specification and outlined recommendations for project implementation. For instance, our software engineers suggested using APIs for order and inventory management to save time and costs.
After researching market-ready solutions, we suggested using Fulfil.IO that allowed for tracking inventory with RFID tags and barcodes, control the availability of goods, monitor stock status, as well as see real-time updates. This off-the-shelf service also enabled merchants to manage orders across numerous channels—e-commerce websites, popular marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, etc.—from one place.
Finally, our developers prioritized features for a web marketplace platform, chose a technology stack, and elaborated a product delivery roadmap.
To ensure an engaging user experience, our software experts worked out the app’s information architecture in such a way that vendors and customers could quickly and easily find anything they need.

During the project, our team solved the following challenges:

  1. A web marketplace platform would potentially serve retailers and consumers across Switzerland and nearby European countries. Therefore, scalability and resilience were top priorities.
    By implementing critical features—a catalog of goods, report generation, data visualization, listing management, online payments, etc.—as a set of loosely coupled services, our engineers provided scalability and resilience to heavy loads. To create a microservices architecture, we used Amazon Web Services as it provides all the required tooling to address client needs.
    Furthermore, this helped us achieve ease of infrastructure maintenance by avoiding the necessity to rewrite the whole system when adding new functionality or making app changes.
  2. To allow vendors to manage sales and take valuable insights into customer behavior, dynamic data analytics had to be enabled.
    Our marketplace development team elaborated a sophisticated algorithm that allows for:
    • gathering data on the number of available goods collecting data on the goods that have been already sold
    • tracking metrics such as the number of product views and purchases
    • collecting data on reviews and ratings to monitor consumer satisfaction
    • generating sales reports for any periods
    • visualizing sales data using charts, graphs, diagrams
    Additionally, we integrated Mixpanel—a GDPR-compliant data analytics tool—to enable sellers to identify which groups of users show the best conversion and retention rates, segment the audience by country and city, as well as define reasons for churn.
  3. In order to provide user support 24/7 and automate request processing, it was essential to incorporate chats.
    Our software engineers conducted research of market-ready solutions like Firechat, Maqpie, and Sendbird to find out which service would allow for meeting client goals in the best way while taking into account pricing for different periods.
    We decided to integrate a digital fashion marketplace with Firechat, an open-source chat powered by Firebase that supports real-time messaging.
  4. It was important to enable authorization via multiple social networks and achieve user data consistency when a customer sign-ins or sign-ups on the platform.
    Our marketplace developers integrated various APIs to provide authorization via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Gmail. When implementing this functionality, our team prevented data duplication that might take place when a consumer used different ways to log in. As a consequence, a database could mistake a user for two app visitors.
    Thanks to addressing this issue, a software system is able to recognize customers employing different ways to sign in.

Features of an e-commerce fashion marketplace

Our software development team built an online fashion marketplace platform that includes functionality for vendors and consumers.

Features of a module for sellers:

  1. Registration and authorization
  2. Store profile
  3. Listing management
  4. Order management
  5. Inventory tracking
  6. Data analytics
  7. Report generation
  8. User dashboard
  9. Admin panel
  10. Payment acceptance and tracking
  11. Verification of retail stores and their banking details
  12. Two-factor authentication

The functionality of a module for customers:

  1. Registration and authorization
  2. User profile
  3. Catalog of goods
  4. Search using numerous filters
  5. User reviews and ratings
  6. Comparison of goods and their prices
  7. Shopping cart
  8. Online payments via Stripe, Braintree, PayPal, credit and debit cards (e.g., Visa, Mastercard), e-wallets, QIWI, WebMoney
  9. The list of “Favorites” goods with the possibility to monitor prices and stock status
  10. Two-factor authentication

Result

Partnering with Arateg, the company developed an e-commerce fashion marketplace that enabled vendors to deliver services across Switzerland and other European countries. By integrating the system with off-the-shelf solutions such as Fulfil.IO and Mixpanel, the client managed to cut down project expenses and improve time to market.
Thanks to a microservices architecture, the organization achieved scalability and fault tolerance of its online marketplace platform, as well as reduced infrastructure maintenance costs.

What our client says

client review, CEO of a Swiss e-commerce company
CEO, Swiss provider of software solutions for e‑commerce

The team at Arateg delivered a quality solution while demonstrating the ability to work efficiently and meet project requirements. Thanks to meaningful recommendations provided by the software experts, we managed to improve time to market and cut costs. We are quite satisfied with the cooperation we’ve established with Arateg.

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