Classifieds website for heavy machinery
Bytupp.se is a classified ads website exclusively built for selling and leasing heavy machinery. This user-friendly platform delivers a smooth experience for potential users who want to sell/lease/hire equipment for construction, excavation, and goods carriage.
LiteBreeze built this application using the Laravel and VueJS frameworks, sustained by the robust features of AWS. The application is powered by the LEMP Stack.
Our client is a Swedish heavy equipment dealer who wanted to build a unique platform for the providers/benefactors of his business spectrum. LiteBreeze’s talented system architects, designers, and project leaders made his vision into reality.
Our team suggested an application MVP be developed initially. This led to the application being published live within 90 days of our initial discussions.
The MVP approach considerably lowers the initial entry barrier for clients, and also helps with getting valuable user feedback for future development.
Even though it was first deployed as an MVP, the key features were in place to deliver a complete end-user experience.
Key features
Landing page: Getting the users to browse/search for products is the primary aim of the landing page. As such, it is carefully designed by LiteBreeze’s design experts to provide a rich search experience.
A map of Sweden is provided with which the user can initiate a location-based search, and also a traditional search box for keyword searches.
Advanced search: The advanced search feature allows end-users to filter ads and get to the relevant ones quickly. The filters include category, price range, location, and keyword.
There is also a set of custom filters that are displayed based on the selected category. For example, while searching for a truck, the user can specify the year of manufacture, the number of axles, body type, etc.
Featured ads: For a nominal fee, sellers can list their ads as featured which increases the visibility. This is one of the main sources of revenue for the client.
Store: The store feature can help organize ads better and serve as a digital shopfront for the seller. Sellers who have multiple ads posted could make use of the store feature, by paying a registration fee.
Buying a store allows sellers to have a custom landing page, where they can add custom promotional content.
Messaging System: An IM style chat option has been provided for users to communicate with the sellers. An unread message notification badge is shown on top of the profile page to make sure sellers don’t miss out on any valuable leads.
Technical information
VueJs
VueJs was chosen for the front-end, as the client demanded a smooth and responsive end-user experience. With the VueJs framework, we developed a feature-rich frontend with reusable components.
AWS cloud infrastructure
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure hosts the application. AWS provides secure, easy to use, high-performance cost-effective hosting solutions. At LiteBreeze, we prefer AWS for our hosting needs due to its highly scalable architecture. Our AWS certified experts can suggest and build optimized server architecture for unique project needs.
AWS Aurora: AWS Aurora provides the database for the application, which is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database. This incorporates the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at one-tenth the cost.
Amazon SES: Amazon Simple Email Service is a reliable, cost-effective service for businesses of all sizes that use email to keep in contact with their customers. We use Amazon SES to deliver all types of transaction emails to the end-users.
Amazon SNS Bounce Notifications is also enabled to catch all email bounces and complaints and handle them programmatically to maintain a higher sender reputation for the application.
Amazon ELB: Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is leveraged to automatically distribute the traffic across multiple servers and to ensure high availability of the website. Currently, we use a single availability zone, but in the future, we recommend using multiple availability zones can handle the traffic even better.
AWS Route 53 is also implemented, which is a cost-effective Domain Name System, to manage the DNS settings of the domain.
Stripe PG
The Stripe payment gateway has been integrated to receive end-user payments on the website. Stripe is a feature-rich payment platform that offers a simple, hassle-free payment interface.
We need not store any customer information on our servers or worry about meeting regulatory requirements for the same, as stripe offers secure methods to store them.
We recommend stripe for applications that use subscription management, as it can be easily integrated with Laravel Cashier, providing an expressive, fluent interface for handling subscriptions.
Next priorities
Helping clients to generate revenue from their business is of prime importance for us at LiteBreeze. The MVP approach was adopted with this in mind. Now, with the MVP going live, we are collecting valuable feedback from the end-users.
Based on this, we are planning to implement the following features in future sprints:
- Integrating Elasticsearch to provide a better search experience for our users
- Allow users to search within multiple geo-locations.
- Automated scripts to clean up residuals like inactive user accounts, ads, stores, etc.
- Adding more controls to the admin panel, like changing payment settings, ad and store validity, etc.
- Making the application available in multiple languages and currencies
- Showing results based on user location
- Image cropping feature
