Car Auction Marketplace: From concept to release in record time

Speed is everything in the highly competitive domain of e-commerce. Digital marketplaces of varied sizes appear at an ever-increasing rate and it becomes more challenging to stand out among the competition. According to estimates, a 6-months delay in a software product release can cut its profitability by at least 30%. These numbers had been relevant 30 years ago, and they have become even more relevant in the modern time or rapid digitization. That’s why entrepreneurs with a promising digital marketplace idea try and bring it to market as soon as possible.

This was the case with one of our clients, an auction marketplace for car sales. The customer had a vision of a world-class e-commerce platform with an efficient auction system and desperately needed to release it in the shortest timeframe possible.

They contacted ABCloudz because of our proven expertise in delivering world-class online marketplace solutions and a rich portfolio of web & mobile apps. Our team was hired to develop a secure, flexible, and multifunctional e-commerce platform from scratch. Moreover, fast and efficient development was the top priority.

Read this article to learn how we boosted the development of this e-marketplace platform and understand the methods that will help you deliver a large e-marketplace faster than your competitor.

Cross-platform development framework for web and mobile apps

In the conditions of a great device variety, it is vital to provide millions of potential buyers with the opportunity to have an excellent experience when choosing and buying a car, regardless of their devices and operating systems on which those devices run.

If you are debating which app type for you product you should prioritize, we recommend that you focus on mobile app development first.  According to recent estimates, 3.5 billion people are smartphone users. Around 80% of them use Android devices, while around 20% use devices running on the iOS operating system. If you ignore such potential app audiences, your app outreach will shrink dramatically. But how can you ensure great platform outreach while keeping its development fast and efficient?

Our client faced this challenge, and we provided them with a cross-platform development approach as an excellent solution. According to estimations, cross-platform development can be 50% more time-efficient than developing different app versions for various operating systems and devices.

To make the client’s app run on various platforms, our team utilized Flutter. This cross-platform development technology is known for its excellent functionality and development speed. We strongly recommend you rely on our Flutter expertise if you want to provide users with the same experience on various platforms while developing an app in a time-efficient manner. Besides, Flutter allows you to use the same app code repeatedly, which delivers substantial cost savings.

Backend built with microservices architecture

Creating a service-packed backend quickly is a significant challenge that often becomes the main obstacle to rapid application development. Large apps require building large numbers of services, server-side components, and connections. Their development, scaling, and configuration can take too much time. Our client required us to deliver sophisticated architecture but did not want us to spend too much time on this task.

In such cases, microservices architecture is a brilliant design approach. It enables developers to build each service as independent modules that are then integrated together. Without getting too detailed, the most significant benefits are scalability, high availability, and fast development.

A crucial factor in the decision was the presence of the Web Development Practice developed in ABCloudz. Within this practice our team has built multiple solutions and software components that are re-used among projects and help get the product off the ground much faster. For example, each web product needs to have a component for data storage, web API, user administration, messaging, and others. Such components can be written from scratch or re-used as building blocks, significantly simplifying and speeding up the development process.

In this project our team re-used a microservices template to get the infrastructure components off the ground amazingly fast. This solution helps us kick off the project quickly and confidently. But it also allowed us to customize it to specific needs of this customer who needed to build an online marketplace quickly.

This solution boosted the speed of developing microservices by 25-30%. It also provides templates that allow the client to add new services 15-20% faster than it takes to create them from scratch.

Use the power of the cloud

When it comes to developing an online marketplace, it is important to design for a high data load and considerable number of users on the platform at the same time. The solution should be robust and scale quickly when users join the platform and create a high load to the servers. Building such a solution in the on-premises (Data Centers) environment is not easy and is quite time consuming.

Fortunately, there’s a solution that will help you build a highly efficient cloud infrastructure without spending many months’ time and most of your budget. Cloud infrastructure, such as AWS, is a perfect choice because it enables excellent scalability of your infrastructure and customizable infrastructure management functionalities. Instead of creating a complex architecture manually, you can just apply a cloud template. Moreover, most of the infrastructure maintenance tasks will be managed by the cloud provider. Check out the image below for some of the most notable AWS cloud development benefits.

To ensure fast and efficient platform development, we suggested the client follow this path and build their infrastructure in the AWS cloud. As a result, numerous platform infrastructure issues were delegated to the cloud provider leaving our developers to focus on building the basic application features.

Building solutions in the cloud requires a deep expertise with a specific cloud. The ABCloudz team is versatile with a team of experts knowledgeable with the most popular cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, GCP. In this project we engaged our AWS Cloud specialists’ team to support our developers throughout the journey.

What will these solutions bring to you?

Here is a summary of the key benefits this solution brought to our customer:

• Development of a large digital marketplace in 6-9 months.
• With the custom microservices architecture practice, the product release was 25-30% faster than with manual architecture development practices.
• The release of new services became 15-20% faster than with manual architecture development practices.
• Cross-platform development supporting iOS, Android and web clients saved time by at least 50% compared to the native development approach.
• Faster infrastructure development and scaling with AWS enabled us to save time for implementing other basic functionalities.

How can other businesses benefit?

Questions? Make sure to contact us to discuss your needs and find out how we can help. The ABCloudz team has extensive expertise in delivering world-class online marketplaces for healthcare services, the construction industry, fitness instructor services, and many more. Our solutions are adaptable to the changes and trends in all markets and are customizable to the needs of any client. And most importantly, they will help you release your product 25-30% faster than the competitors.