DELIVERING COMPLEX SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS FOR THE ONLINE AUCTION HOUSE PLATFORM

About The Project

Paddle8 is New York-based and world-famous online auction house for collectors, curators, and artists. It showcases a dynamic range of art, collectibles, and luxury goods in partnership with cultural institutions, international tastemakers, and more than 200 museums worldwide.

Industry: Media/Auction
Location: United States

Services:
Mobile Development
Web Development

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THE SITUATION

Paddle8 had the auction platform that was already in production and chose Wise Engineering as an experienced software development partner to work closely with their development team.

The main functionality of the platform

Auctions where collectors can buy the desired item:
- auction engine (bidding engine)
- push notification to mobile apps
- alerting system (Bid email, Outbid email, Action close email)
- tax and shipping calculation system
Auctions administration:
- managing of auctions, artists, galleries, members with the possibility to create new or edit existing
- post auctions reports and statistics
Features for collectors:
- user profile with a history of bidding
- expert estimate request
- bidding

We were tasked to:

support a mobile application in production
develop new admin panel features
improve site search performance
optimize project infrastructuret
provide front-end & back-end development
build a database management
plan and start a migration to Kubernetes

From the beginning, 3 software engineers started work on the project, cooperating with the CTO, the Marketing department in the USA, and the distributed development team. In a couple of months, 3 more engineers joined the team.

THE SOLUTION

Working on the project, our team provided Paddle8 with a wide range of services. It included:

technical consultancy
web and mobile development
designing, coding, and unit/integration testing
debugging, and troubleshooting code-related issues/defects
creation of features technical design documentation, based on business and technical requirements

The project consisted of legacy parts, so our team also had to take care of code clean-up, refactoring, and supporting an old codebase, which resulted in smoother operations requiring fewer people and computing resources. At the same time, it allowed reducing the cost of ownership by constantly improving and optimizing infrastructure.

To fully implement the client's vision, the following solutions were provided:

1. The new development setup

With moving all services from legacy unsupported Vagrant VM setup to Docker compose, we significantly speeded up setup and simplify onboarding of new developers.

2. New site search

To enhance the Paddle8 search experience, we performed data migration and integrated it with ElasticSearch software. As the application conned huge parts of the legacy, our team made it possible that all parts remained backward compatible once the new search was enabled.

3. Design and implementation of new Admin panel features

Bid retraction feature

Deleting a bid was a time-consuming manual process since it required running a SQL query in the database and additional testing to make sure that it didn’t affect other auctions/bids. The new bid retraction feature allowed the admin to delete any bids placed accidentally or by mistake for the auction lot from the auction admin page. It helped Paddle8 to save time and made the overall process of removing misplaced bids more secure.

Storefront management

The platform provided two options of how the users could buy a collectible:

the auction, where collectors place a bid and the highest bid win;
a storefront, opposite of auctions, where they can buy an item for a fixed price.

Before the project started, administrators were able to add the item to Storefront only by hard-coding images, data in the code, which was inconvenient and not safe. With the implementation of enabled storefront management, an auction admin can publish a new storefront from the web interface, add images, data, and select the page for the item to be located at. As a result, it allowed Paddle8 to save time and keep consistency when creating storefronts.

RESULTS

As a result of cooperation, the Wise team delivered full-fledged engineering solutions that enabled Paddle8:

to reduce the cost of ownership by infrastructure improvement and optimization;
get better site search performance with new ElasticSearch implementation;
reduce manual processes for the auction admin panel and make the overall process of removing misplaced bids more secure and safer;
speed up development setup and simplify onboarding of new developers;
save time and keep consistency when creating storefronts with new storefront management implementation.