GIObikes: Online marketplace and a community for bikes fans

Project information

Overview

GIObikes is a worldwide online marketplace and community for recreational lifestyle equipment that gives customers the ability to purchase vehicles, parts, and accessories. Originally started in Canada with factories and warehouses in China, GIObikes soon spread all over the world.

Our Task

Initially, clients were selling their goods through the popular eBay platform, but with the sales growth, it became obvious that they needed more space and possibilities, and it was decided to create their own marketplace. The idea was to create a specific E-commerce solution that would provide users with an online shopping experience. As the company was very successful while holding auctions for its products on eBay—it wanted to implement auctioning features on its platform, too.

Building it from scratch, CodeIT had to implement the following functionality:

• Online auction
• Affiliate system
• Products inventory systems
• Dealers system
• Buy it now shopping
• Integrated shipping services (e.g. UPS, Day&Ross, Vitran)
• Integrated payment gateways (PayPal, Billmelater) and stress-free payments
• Social features (reviews, forum, blog, q&a)

While discussing the features that the marketplace required it was decided to include the following user roles: 

• Customer 
• Admin

Features implemented

Customer

Customer functionality is rather simple, as in every E-commerce solution. They can browse the platform to search for what they would like to purchase, add the item to a cart, or place a bid in the auction. In order to start bidding right away, users need to register an account and purchase some bids which are available in the bid package. User’s IP address gets recorded with every login which is atypical for E-commerce solutions but we added this feature in order to prevent fraudulent bidders.

Searching for Items

Users can either search or browse the website for the items they want. The “Search” option is provided with the help of the search field at the top of the page. When Users start entering the keyword in the search field, they get a drop-down list of possible options. Another way is to browse through the main menu and categories that are initially located on the homepage.

Buying Process

There are several possible buying options available on the website.

• Shopping cart. Users find the fixed price item they want, add it to the shopping cart, calculate Shipping and Tax, read terms and conditions, and checkout.
• Auctioning. Users place bids for the item beginning from the seller’s starting price and wait until the end of the listing. The item goes to the buyer who offered the highest price.
• Buy It Now. Sellers might add this function in auctions. This gives users the opportunity to immediately purchase the item for the price set by the seller instead of placing bids.

Payment

The platform offers several payment options:

• Credit card. Users enter their card type and information to pay for the item(s).
• Paypal. Users can check out securely without sharing their financial information if they have a PayPal account.
• Money order or bank wire. Users can pay with money orders or electronic funds transfer if that is allowed by their banks.
• Stress-free payments. Users can pay with the Card but divide the payment into several steps. The system automatically divides the amount into 10 parts and shows on what dates and how much will be withdrawn from the user’s bank account.

Admin

This is where the up-to-date statistics and information were shown about the sales to date, orders, user statistics, sold auctions, pending payments, etc. The statistics can be shown for every category in the chosen period—today, last 3/7 days, current month/year, etc.

Dashboard

This is where the up-to-date statistics and information were shown about the sales to date, orders, user statistics, sold auctions, pending payments, etc. The statistics can be shown for every category in the chosen period—today, last 3/7 days, current month/year, etc.

Sales

This is an extensive section that deals with everything connected to the sales process and contains several sub-menus. Here, the admin manages orders and bid packs, processes and controls shipments, and generates sales reports.

Inventory

This section contains information about all the goods in the store and stock, and the admin can manage the details. This menu gives details about where the item is located in the store, what items are available, and what quantities are available. It also sends email alerts.

Blog

Admin can create various blog categories, manage comments, add, edit or delete posts.

Catalog

This list of every product with the indication of its availability, price, status, what category it belongs to. Here, we also implemented a drop-down menu to provide the filtering function. Also in this section, responsible users could create coupons, different contests for users, add product accessories to the list, manage and review questions from customers.

Customers

The functionality of this section is to manage, edit and delete users and dealers, create affiliate programs, and see logs report.

Newsletter

This part involves creating newsletters and seeing subscribers and statistics.

Auctions

As auctions take the great part of the platform they have their own section in the admin panel. It is shown there what auctions are active, sold/unsold, pending and unpaid. Moreover, the admin can add new items to the listing, manage auction fees, and archive auctions.

Content Management System

Basically, the whole website is concentrated in this section, meaning it contains all the pages, statistics, images, texts, hint windows, banners, email templates, news, etc.

System Administration

All configurations are placed in this part of the admin panel. The admin manages the countries the company works with, shipping companies and their rates, various tools for backups, and URL page statistics.

The system is incredibly big and contains a lot of details, menus, and functionalities. Additionally, every product had the Information panel that included every possible data about the item.

Additional

The functionality of the e-commerce platform was enhanced with additional solutions developed and integrated by CodeIT specialists.

Inventory Management

Inventory is one of the most interesting features. First of all, this system is used for warehouse inventory accounting to understand how many products are in the store. Second of all, it is for logistics, to avoid misunderstandings, and not to sell one item twice. The system showed how many items there were in store at the moment and how much in the stock. At any moment, the admin could click the “Out of Stock” button, which would remove the product from sales. All the documents for the products, reports and bar-codes were created automatically by the system.

Auctions

The auctions are one of the most complex features. Admin users created the listing template – in other words, an algorithm—to start a long-term auction. Initially, the auctions were designed to continue for 24 hours, but after that time, in order to stop the process, there should be no bidding for 15 seconds.

The form allowed setting up settings for every auction, such as what kind of auction it is, the price, start and stop listing date, listing time, how many to sell, minimum price, etc. The system automatically chooses the time range when to show auctions depending on the number of items to sell and the period during which they have to be sold.

We also implemented special “robots” that when needed could make bids to raise the price to the minimum desired one. They were also set up in the Product information menu by the admin—he chose the number of robots and when they should start bidding.

Result

A global marketplace for bikes, parts, and accessories

CodeIT professionals have created a rather large and complex system to provide smooth work for e-commerce solutions. GIObikes platform had 5,000 daily active users, 400 simultaneous auctions, and yearly around $7 million turnover. The system worked with more than 150 countries and had a lot of affiliate programs and integrated shipping and payment services.

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