B2B Rental Marketplace 2014
Bring an existing business department and its processes online and up-to-date using a marketplace mediating with third-party suppliers.
Types: Web, Mobile, Server; Roles: Architecture, Management, Training, Documentation, Development; Functions: E-commerce, API, Content Management, Mapping; Tools: NodeJS, MongoDB, Javascript, Titanium.
Innovations
- Multiple pricing and comission models to support both owned assets and third-party assets
- Per-class (category, product or variant) cascading inherited attributes, with ancestor and descendant overrides providing a variety of ways to control how suppliers add new items and values
- Mediated messaging, with client-supplier messaging relayed through an operator
- Supplier auctioning with deferred (countdown) booking assignments in cases of unknown availability
- Collection options using geolocation
- Flexible delivery class calculations assignable per-category and postcode
- Geographical search ranking availability of items with delivery constraints
- Ability for an operator to easily swap their CMS view to that of a supplier (delegate authentication) when handling operations by telephone
Features
- Categorised product (and variant) listings with search
- Bespoke CMS handling categories, products and their variants with dynamic attributes
- Booking functionality (not calendared)
- CMS and API for suppliers
- Mobile app with push notifications and messaging for suppliers and customers
- Multi-device and multi-role authentication and notification settings
Notes
The existing business department had been managed predominantly with knowledge retained by a small team of personnel, primarily functioning simultaneously as telesales operators and supplier liasions, using spreadsheets as their only IT system.
Guidance was provided in determining suitable models to make the ad-hoc markups consistent.
The project was undertaken on contract with the initial development undertaken from Lisbon, and subsequently in New Delhi with a PM in the UK. The project was cancelled following client's capacity limitations with their IT department to complete basic integrations with the new platform.
Design was temporary put in place myself.
The mobile app was developed primarily using embedded responsive web views that allowed speedy function development with access to all CMS functionality. Notifications provided seamless on device access to the views.