LiteBreeze developed a complex event and marketplace website for a Dutch company using Laravel and Elasticsearch. The website provides an extensive event calendar with a detailed chronological listing of nearby events and festivals. Through this, a user can search and find nearby local events and festivals.

The website also offers a marketplace to the event organizers to advertise and buy event-related products and services. The event organizers widely use this marketplace to hire photographers, interior designers, musicians, medical staff, security guards and other required human resources for their events.

Features Overview

User account categories

This website has three distinct user account categories with corresponding access levels:

1. Festival visitor: They have limited privileges and are only allowed to search and find details of nearby events. These search details can then be saved in their inbox.
2. Event organizer: These users have maximum privileges, they can create new events, publish advertisements, contact advertisers.
3. Marketplace user: Marketplace users offer event-related services. They have the same privileges as of event organizers except that they are not allowed to create new events.  

Some of the key benefits and features of the system are:

Event calendar

The event calendar page lists nearby events and festivals in chronological order. A festival visitor can search and find details of an event swiftly using this calendar. 

We have integrated Google geolocation API to personalize a user’s search by displaying his/her nearest events first. This aims to provide the best possible user experience.

Marketplace

The marketplace provides a platform for event organizers and marketplace users to advertise or find products, services, and staff for events. The marketplace allows users to publish classifieds either about their requirements or about the products/services they provide.

The default validity period of a classified is four weeks but it can be extended by paying a renewal fee. The website also supports premium advertisements which enables the advertiser to pin their classifieds on top of the page by paying a promotion fee.

The renewal fee and promotion fee constitutes the major revenue of the website.

For enhanced security and authenticity at the marketplace, all advertisements will be reviewed by the website administrators before being published.

Auctions

Advertisers can list their classifieds for an auction at the marketplace. The portal also supports reverse auctions, in which it is the seller who will bid instead of the buyer.

Bidders get frequent updates about the latest bid via email and it is the seller’s discretion to select the buyer. Bidders get notified about price changes and also when bidding closes post a successful sale.

Website promotion

We have integrated UpViral referral system into the website so that the website administrators can conduct unique promotional programmes such as weekly contests. This website and the programmes can be promoted through different social media platforms.

The easy to use referral system aims to attract more traffic to the website through the website’s registered users.

Highly scalable architecture

The website is built in a highly scalable architecture to handle increasing user demand and huge traffic in the future. We have ensured that the application is stateless to facilitate horizontal scaling requirements of the server.

The website support online payments and all payments are done through Mollie payment gateway. Mollie gateway provides a wide variety of easy and safe payment methods and we integrated payment methods such as iDEAL, Bancontact and PayPal along with cards payments.

The website has an easy to use control panel. With a dedicated ACL, the super administrator can control permissions and delegate roles amongst admin users.

We are using automated email notifications to reduce administrative efforts for micromanaging the marketplace system. This feature also aims to enhance the business by ensuring timely payment reminders.  

The website has multi-language support. Currently, all the website content is in Dutch, but the application has a provision to add more languages with ease. The website also supports the addition of more geographic locations for future expansion of business.

Technical information

This customized web solution was built from scratch using the laravel framework and Bootstrap 4 CSS. We created a fully responsive, mobile-first design as per the client requirements. We have used AWS S3 for file uploads and redis driver for session storage to make the application stateless.

We have also integrated facebook pixel and google analytics to analyze site traffic. This analytical data will be used to gauge user response and further enhance the website.

Future challenges

We have completed the first version of the website as a minimum viable product. Moving forward, we plan to focus on the possibilities of Elasticsearch and redis caching for further improving the site performance and overall user experience.