OnOff.ge: a multi-vendor marketplace built on nopCommerce
Onoff.ge marketplace sells mobile phones, accessories, small and large appliances. It offers 101.000 products from 70 vendors and has 5000 unique daily visitors. The site was built from scratch using nopCommerce.
Challenge
To build one of the largest and comprehensive online catalog of mobile phones, accessories, small and large appliances, which contains complete information on the technical parameters, offers (prices and warranty terms) and suppliers of any item placed on it. For each product, all the prices from all the registered vendors can be observed on a single page.
The project was made by the Wandio team. According to them, “The main challenge was to handle a large number of products. We had over 100k items with 1 million pictures and specifications. It was problematic to locate the pictures and automatically generate thumbnails on the go. To solve this issue, we moved thumbnail generation to upload pictures section and created our own CDN interface. To fill out the specifications we created flat tables in the catalog for easy filtering”.
Solution
nopCommerce was chosen as the platform solution to create a multi-vendor marketplace.
“The main reason for choosing nopCommerce for this project was the fact that we have great experience in building eCommerce applications on the nopCommerce platform. Also features requested by the client were mostly already implemented in nopCommerce so it was the best fit,” says Wandio team.
Home page
Configurable banners were built on the home page and categories section. The home page contains 8 banners. They are managed by OnOff administrator, can change color and sequences. The admin can use 8 different visuals, unite several sections into one or post one big image.
Apart from static images animations can also be added on the Ad banner space from the admin panel with HTML code without having to involve Wandio developers. To make the banners dynamic scheduler tasks and settings table were used.
The same customizable banners space is used on each category page, but it contains 6 different sections only. The admin defines how many times and where the banner will be shown on the category page.
Filtering and navigation
There is no other website in Georgia offering such a variety of different ways to filter search results and find the product according to up to 100 filter options. Implementing filters with specifications was a great challenge. Different parts of the catalog had to be loaded dynamically with Ajax. To make filtering faster, the flat table for specifications was created.
The products are grouped in the categories page by models to make navigation convenient. Without having to click the product details section, the visitor can see the price range of the current offer, how many offers are available and the rating of the product.
The product details page contains 3 tabs:
- Product related information: Photo/video of the product, technical characteristics/description.
- Reviews page, where you can see the reviews of the product written by the users after buying it.
- Offers page, where you can see in detail which stores sell the product, how much it costs in each store, terms of delivery and guarantee. From this section, you add the product to the basket.
Prices and product details from up to 10 stores are automatically updated without the admin having to interfere.
When the user buys the product, the amount is blocked first and only after the vendor checks availability of the product, the money is cut from the balance of the user. If the product appears to be not in stock, the blocked amount is automatically returned to the user.
Additional features
Comparison page: the users can choose as many products for comparison as they want. The differences are emphasized, the user can hide the similarities and observe what is different about the chosen products.
Moreover, there is the option to underline the products that are technologically better. It is set up from the admin panel. Admin grants the weight for each specification and marks to show it during the comparison. Some metrics can also be marked for “reverse comparison”, for example, the weight of the mobile phone, which is the less the better.
Delivery price calculator: The delivery price is defined by four parameters: city, category, the total value of the purchase, and the weight. These parameters can be used separately or all together, or only two of them, it’s all up to the admin.
Elasticsearch implementation: For the amount of data on the OnOff website, regular searching and filtering systems are not sufficient. In order to make the website performance faster, Elasticsearch was implemented.
Product objects are now stored in Kibana. For relations like category, specification, vendor, manufacturer nested objects and languages for the nested objects were created. This allows searching in any language. When the new language is added to the website, Elasticsearch is automatically updated.
The first implemented version of Elasticsearch was fetching product IDs only. The newer version Wandio is working on will fetch all the fields needed for search and will be much faster. There will be no need to contact the MSSQL database each time. Suggestions will also be added to search in the future.
Results
OnOff marketplace was launched in January 2019. Now it has:
- Number of products - 101.000
- Number of Brands - 3.400
- Number of Vendors - 70
- Daily unique visitors - 5.000
Wandio is a software outsourcing company based in Georgia that builds reliable back-end systems, web & mobile applications. Specialization of the team includes building large eCommerce and payment solutions, CMS systems, ERP/CRM, HR/Recruitment applications, intranets and alike.