Online Portal
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Our client
Our Client is a renowned “globetrotter” with a great experience in understanding specific markets in various countries, constantly seeking opportunities to launch start-ups and monetize their online businesses ideas.
Client's Need
Our client approached us with a business idea that relied on social networking and proved to be a success as soon as the Beta version was launched. The main challenge was to create and define an open and free marketplace for micro-businesses all over the world.
They wanted to develop a self-marketing platform where members create their own product showrooms, buy or sell products, join specific communities and seamlessly interact with each other and with their clients.
Our Approach
We were able to appreciate the great potential in the idea that the client presented to us and, after a meeting at the client’s headquarters in Spain, we began our collaboration.
Their initial specifications represented a broad description of the product they had envisioned and these specifications evolved as we presented them with the most performant technical options that could support their objectives.
The social commerce platform would allow its members to create an unlimited number of free showrooms, post unlimited products, chat on their community wall with their clients and send invoices or quotes.
We customized a technical solution on the market to suit their requirements and provided our client with expert consultancy to improve their technical and communication processes.Solution
We customized a Social Engine platform with third-party plugins, adapting them to fit the client’s needs. The platform was developed in PHP 5 using Zend Framework 2, MySQL as a database and for the front end we used Twitter Bootstrap, CSS3 & HTML5.
We had to implement an advanced Caching solution to boost the efficiency of the hosting resources and, as Online Portal users began uploading more and more images, we decided to move them on Amazon S3.
As the project advanced, the team grew from 2 to 6 developers. We adjusted the delivery milestones to fit the client’s needs, varying from daily updates to once-every-two-weeks launches.
The website was designed to support a high number of concurrent users and was hosted on the Amazon Cloud using many of the AWS APl and features like: Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53, Amazon EBS, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon RDBS, Amazon ElastiCache.
We added a Facebook ‘like’ internal option available to Online Portal members only, where they can like or share a showroom, suggest it to friends, send messages, add a showroom to favourites, having all of these actions displayed in their Online Portal community of choice.
We combined a powerful social network with a responsive online selling platform to deliver a set of intuitive useful tools to vendors around the world:
The website was designed to support a high number of concurrent users and was hosted on the Amazon Cloud using many of the AWS APl and features like: Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Route 53, Amazon EBS, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon RDBS, Amazon ElastiCache.
We added a Facebook ‘like’ internal option available to Online Portal members only, where they can like or share a showroom, suggest it to friends, send messages, add a showroom to favourites, having all of these actions displayed in their Online Portal community of choice.
We combined a powerful social network with a responsive online selling platform to deliver a set of intuitive useful tools to vendors around the world:
- Full integration of Facebook APl with the following possible actions: sign up, login, post products and Facebook page tab application
- Twitter signup and login
- lntegrated tools to increase brands' SEO visibility and social networking website link sharing for brand marketing
- Possibility to join discussions within the community or establish connections with other business owners
- Implementation of Online Portal's own payment system - the beecoin
The final result was an online social marketing network that combines a powerful social network with e-commerce features.
Client's benefits from working with us
- The platform that we created met and exceeded the client's expectations in terms of quality and performance, which attracted the investors that they were seeking
- The client made significant cost savings compared to what they would have spent trying to build a similar-quality product in-house
- Our extensive experience in developing complex web solutions and high level of professionalism ensured that deliveries were always made on time, without compromising on quality
- The excellent communication between the client and us, thanks to our team’s technical and linguistic proficiency, meant that the client was able to effortlessly get their needs across
- Our successful collaboration has already spanned two and a half years and will be extended for at least another year.
- Online Portal has caught the interest of online communities and gained considerable attention from several online publications describing its end-user’s benefits.
