Marketplace for Tanzania
Industry:
Ecommerce
Duration:
11 months
Team:
Country:
Tanzania
Technology:
The client is an ecommerce business specializing in local free classified ads — offering a wide range of categories for its users, including Cars, Real Estate, Sports, Leisure, Jobs, Men’s Fashion, Women’s Fashion, Accessories, and more.
Project Overview
To provide Tanzanians with a secure and reliable classifieds platform for buying and selling a wide range of goods and services, Kupatana chose EBS Integrator to solve its existing system legacy and operational issues and add custom functionality. As a result, the leading buy/sell platform in Tanzania now has a future-proof marketplace with 40% more customer engagement. It provides a secure and geographically convenient place for more than 300,000 active listings to transact.
The Challenge:
Building a scalable e-commerce platform
Building a new, consolidated e-commerce platform that combined the best features of Kupatana and Zoom Tanzania, ensuring it was user-friendly, mobile-responsive, and feature-rich.
Integrate different systems into one
Integrating different systems using Java, Spring, Swift, Kotlin, and React while ensuring 99.9% system uptime posed technical challenges, but it was essential for providing a seamless user experience.
Migrate millions of data with no downtime
Migrating million data points from both platforms required meticulous planning to avoid data loss and ensure less than 2% downtime, crucial for maintaining user trust.
Implement AI for ad placement
Developing AI algorithms for ad placement and content moderation to address technical and operational challenges of platform's efficiency and user satisfaction.
The Solution:
E-commerce Platform with AI features and System Upgrades
We set out to unify the e-commerce experience for Kupatana and Zoom Tanzania - to create a seamless and engaging platform that could handle high traffic. We used custom scripts to successfully migrate 100 million data points with less than 2% downtime. Using Java, Spring, Swift, Kotlin and React, we built a robust system with proven performance. Our AI algorithms revolutionised ad placement and content moderation, reducing manual effort by 70%. We also refined the user interface based on feedback from beta testing to ensure it retained its intuitive user experience.
The outcome is a user-friendly classifieds platform with 40% more engagement and 25% better conversion rates.
The most critical thing was the ability to educate and think logically with the designs, nothing was left un-noticed, if they weren't sure they asked, if it didn't seem right they suggested, and their ability to communicate this with me was immense.
Makusaro T.
General Manager
Development Phases
Conducted thorough market research to understand the eCommerce and marketplace landscape.
Technical feasibility study — a deep dive into Kupatana's existing infrastructure and an assessment of the integration potential with Zoom Tanzania.
Risk assessment and strategy formulation, focusing on leveraging Java, Spring, Swift, Kotlin, and React technologies to create a robust and scalable platform.
Developed a seamless integration of the Kupatana and Zoom Tanzania platforms, utilizing Java and Spring for a robust backend, and React for an interactive front-end user experience.
Agile methodology application for iterative development, allowing for flexibility and continuous improvement based on real-time feedback.
Ensured a user-friendly interface with Swift for iOS and Kotlin for Android, enhancing the mobile user experience.
Migrated approximately 100 million data points from both platforms, with a focus on ensuring data integrity and zero downtime.
Implemented advanced AI algorithms to automate the categorization of ads and product listings, as well as to monitor and filter out prohibited content.
Developed custom scripts for automated data migration, reducing manual effort and minimizing the risk of errors.
Launched a Beta version to a select user group, collecting and analyzing feedback for refinements.
Applied the feedback to enhance user interface design and functionality, ensuring the platform is intuitive and meets the needs of diverse user groups.
Final rollout of the consolidated e-commerce platform, emphasizing on stability, user engagement, and scalability.
Performance & Optimization
System Scalability: The platform was designed with scalability in mind, using technologies like Java and Spring, and the backend architecture was optimized to handle increased traffic and data loads.
AI integration: AI algorithms were implemented to automate the categorization of ads and product listings.
Infrastructure & Server Optimization: The server infrastructure was optimized for load balancing and efficient handling of simultaneous requests, ensuring high availability and minimal downtime.
Quality Assurance & Testing: Rigorous testing was carried out throughout the development process, including load testing to ensure the platform could handle peak traffic without performance issues.
Results
Data Migration
100 million
data migrated
Migration of all the data assigned to the users of the platform without a negative impact, for instance (loss of data, or issues in synchronization).
Customer Engagement
+40%
more users
2 million
active monthly users
Once with the scaling and the migration process, the business activity and number of users increased.
Agile Development
2400
</dev> hours
70+
meeting hours
Due to constant collaboration with the Client/stakeholder and receiving feedback on each step, permitted to improve and adapt this methodology specifically for this project (following a process of planning, execution, and evaluation).