Gift buying social platform

GIFT BUYING SOCIAL PLATFORM​

The system represents a social platform used for gift recommendations and ideas. It features gift registry creation and saving for different special occasions. Thus, the application saves favorite gifts from social media or different online shops and keeps track of gifts for every special occasion. Furthermore, the solution includes an event-based system where the user can keep track of gift shopping and create reminders or events. Sharing this information with friends works like a breeze. Besides, the platform features sharing gift lists, registries, and gift suggestions with connected family and friends. Gift suggestion uses an intelligent mechanism to list only the items that are relevant to the search criteria.

Software development project done by ZYNK in Romania. Gift buying social platform.

Solution

Our focus was to provide value to our target audience with a set of very simple but well-developed and easy-to-understand and use key functionalities.
First, we created a solution that can quickly and easily get information about a product from a web resource and keep that information up to date. Second, we provided an optimized search engine that can quickly find the products a user looks for. We achieved this key feature with the latest technologies for search query optimization. The resources from which users can import gifts include online shops, social media, and local storage, among others.
Furthermore, we made the system automatically generate events based on user preferences and ensure the users are constantly updated on the upcoming events through push notifications.

Platform Health Tracking
All the components of the system use technologies meant to offer constant feedback on the health status of the solution. In short, we mean logs, alarms, crash notifications, etc. With this approach, we made sure we are always ahead of any problem that might arise.

Post-development Support
Our team constantly optimizes the components of the system based on feedback from our clients and our users. They also advise our clients, relying on their vast expertise.

Challenges

Letting the users import their favorite gifts from countless resources and keeping them up to date were our main challenges. For this reason, we created a robust data crawling process.

Each platform has its own way of structuring the data. Our team analyzed the different structures that could be used as input to create a reliable crawling functionality. Then, they found a way to identify this structure and assign the corresponding crawling process. Furthermore, they ensured this approach keeps track of the structures that the application could not parse. As a result, they can constantly analyze new ways of improving the crawling process.

In addition, there were some challenges on the UI & UX side of the project, which the team worked closely with our client to address. For one way, they found the best way to display the product information. For the other, they improved the overall user experience through the flows from the platforms, like product searching, filtering, suggestions, etc.

Last, the web platform struggled with SEO optimization initially. Given that, our team decided to implement server-side rendering. As a result, the website gained an impressive boost on the SEO side and performance, making the web pages load faster.

Highlights

We had at least six notable achievements in this project. First, the advanced search mechanism for providing relevant gift suggestions was well received by the users. Second, the management of large volumes of data works flawlessly. Third, the calendar reminders proved more than useful and received excellent reviews. Fourth, not only us found the user interface friendly but also the users. Last, the integrated third-party retailer platforms proved a real asset for the solution.

Business Value

Working hand in hand with the client from the analysis phase, we delivered a stable and optimized product. The solution helps parents overcome most of the obstacles they normally encounter while buying a gift for friends and family members.

Industry

Retail, eCommerce

Areas of Application

Social Network, Big Data

Type of Project

Delivery Model

Custom software development, time and materials model

Effort and Duration

60 man-months, ongoing

Main Activities

IT consulting, Architecture and design, software development, software testing

Technologies

Java, Spring Framework, JavaScript, Angular, Angular Universal, HTML5, CSS3, Bootstrap, PostgreSQL, AWS, Android, Kotlin, iOS Swift, Elastic Search, Docker

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