Custom niche marketplace development for New York providers

When we first met the client, their main digital product – the marketplace for service providers and their customers – already existed and had been operating for some time with a different branding. There was some demand for the platform, and there were some transactions going through it, but it was more of a luck than a routine. The situation needed to be changed.

The key growth potential was to get more customers on the platform, as service providers were already onboarded and ready to offer their services. So our objective was to improve and expand the platform to bring in more customers and finally put the process on the rails.

ProperGuild is a niche marketplace focused on connecting NY customers with local providers offering a variety of services. Product Owner focused on such service categories as Health & Fitness, Beauty, Coaching, Household and Repair, etc.

Marketing research has found that New Yorkers really need a place where they can find a service provider in New York by location, description, and reviews. The reality, however, showed that providers were more interested in the new portal than customers, and that resulted in a low conversion rate for the marketplace.

To rebalance providers and customers, the Corpsoft.io team performed rebranding and refactoring as well as developed and improved the following features on the platform:

Service and Provider Search with filtering by location and category;

Free built-in Q&A chat;

Paid online consultations for services;

Payment through Stripe integration and more.

How did that benefit the project custom software development process?

The project came to us just as the Covid-19 global lockdown started. Custom web development in the Covid-19 pandemic was challenging but even that experience didn’t stop us, along with the Product Owner, from looking for ways to keep the platform alive. We discussed many options and hypotheses before we focused on services good for remote workers. And we were right.

The Corpsoft.io team helped expand the platform, redesigned the UI and rebranded the product itself, improved SEO and performance metrics, along with adding new features that brought added value to the platform’s offering for its users.

The success of the project goes deeper than just technical expertise. Beyond just developing new features and improving existing ones, we faced and completed such challenges:

A hands-on domain understanding, in addition to technical expertise. We addressed this challenge as our team not only built custom marketplaces before, but also has been acquiring and accumulating insights from learning how other successful marketplace owners (such as Kabanchik.ua) were sharing their knowledge and recipes for success.

Compiling the diverse technical inputs into the system. The system had previously been in the hands of 4 different teams. The contribution was on different tech levels and of different quality. To ensure the platform is working stable and well, we have fully studied the code base, fixed errors, improved and optimized the system without interrupting new features development.

We took the Scrumban approach. Scrumban is a framework that combines the structure and predictable routines of Scrum with Kanban’s flexibility to make teams more agile, efficient, and productive.

As a tech stack, that includes security, customizability, extensibility, and the ability to build APIs, we used Laravel, PHP 8.1+, Vue.js, HTML 5, CSS and MySQL as database.

Other tools used: Trello, Zoom, Slack, Google spreadsheets.