Challenge
Develop a web-based auction platform for sports trading cards.
Outcome
Developed a user-friendly auction platform that could handle all the bidding processes in real time.
Client
The Clubhouse
Industry
Sports Cards
# of Users
10,000s
Architecture Solution
What we built
The Clubhouse was an emerging sports card community that wanted to add live auction capability to their website. Given the competitive and dynamic nature of the process they needed all bids to be resolved in less than a second and for the UI to be updated in real time. They also wanted to add live streaming video of the ‘breaks’ so users could watch the card boxes being opened and determine which cards they won. Build Labs delivered a robust auction engine using a .NET Core C# web application that integrates with Word Press for customer’s site and Stripe for payment processing. The live streaming and chat included integrations with Dolby.io and getstream.io. Finally, the bid notifications themselves were achieved via an integration with OneSignal.
.NET Core
Consumer Facing
GitHub API
Payment Integration
API Driven
Flutter
Dolby.io
Getstream.io
OneSignal
Our Technical Solution
The original choice was to use Word Press for the auction engine, but it became apparent as the demand on the auction engine grew that a higher performance solution was required. We moved to .NET Core because it offered the processing power required to meet the combination of fast response times and many simultaneous users.
The auction engine was integrated with OneSignal to send out key notifications (such as auction status and whether a user had been outbid on an item). After the winning bid was determined, orders were automatically created in Word Press and the appropriate credit card was billed via an integration with Stripe.
The streaming component of the application was handled via integrations with Dolby.io and getstream.io for chat messaging and activity feeds.
The next phase of the development is currently underway and includes added payment support for PayPal. Finally, a mobile application is in the works which being built using Flutter.