Implementation of online auction and RFQ platform for Iron & steel products including detailed portfolio management

The client reached out to us with a partially built site, as their development team was not able to complete the remaining work due to some issues. The client was looking for a development team to pick up the development, instead of building from scratch. The client had a limited timeline, as they were already behind schedule and they planned to launch the site in one of the largest construction and manufacturing expos in the country. They reached out to a number of teams, but none were keep to pick up on an existing codebase. Our team, however, were up for the challenge. We did a detailed discovery workshop, and laid down a clear development plan that included enough time for code review and reverse engineering.

The major requirements of the site can be mainly grouped into the following:

User Account Creation & Registration Mechanism

Users should be able to create accounts. We had to replace the email based registration system to a phone number based registration system. The users need to add their phone numbers and OTP will be sent to them. Once they add in the OTP, they will be asked to set their password and get in. To change the password also, they need to add in Phone Number and validate the OTP. We used Twillio as OTP service for the supported countries, and used a private SMS service for Iran, which the client preferred. Once in, users can set their profile data and can use start to create products and other entities.

Products

This is the main building block of the other entities - RFQs, Tender Sales and Auctions. User needs to add at least one product before they can create other entities. The product had a huge number of specification fields, and they needed to organised as cleanly as possible. We employed Field Collection, Field Collection tables and host of other modules for this, in total we had around 46 fields to be created in the product content type itself. We also employed google Maps and reverse geocoding for the Load Location field.

RFQs

Sellers could then, once they had added some products, create RFQs or Request for Quotes. This had a complicated feature of either choosing a product, or be able to custom product right in that content type, which needed to be multivalued. Main complication was that the number of fields were huge, around 46. We solved this problem using Inline Entity form and Field Collection AJAX modules. The RFQs also had an end date, and users could bid on the RFQ till the end date. The RFQ bid feature was implemented using the comments entity on the RFQ node and a few custom tables to track pricing.

Auctions

The Auction feature had all the features of normal auction. Sellers could create auction and mention the products he wants to auction (that the seller created). He would also mention an end date of the auction and a base price. The users will then bid on the auction. This bid feature was fully custom implemented, and users can only bid an amount that is greater than the last bid. At the end of the timeframe, the user with highest bid amount will be the winner.

Membership Feature

We used membership Entity as the base for this feature and then extended the work through our custom modules. The membership Entity module declares everything through Entity API making it very much extendible. We implemented additional permission checks and associated roles to award and revoke membership. Also, the membership page is integrated to registration. As user sets their password, they are taken to membership page, asking them if they would subscribe. They have the option to skip this step though.

Private Chat

The chat feature was implemented using the Drupalchat module. We used the code and forked the module to add our necessary customisations. Need to heavily customise it, but nevertheless the base work has been very helpful and time saver. In Phase II plan is to use nodejs and the chat driver, right now it's using ajax polling method.