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Define the product

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SPEEDonline from AUTOonline is an online auction marketplace for damaged car buyers in 24 EU and LATAM countries. We're like e-bay for damaged cars.

It only covers the auction part of the vehicle total loss management workflow. Pre and post-auction steps are covered by other apps.

• Vehicle owner reserves the right to sell the vehicle
• Vehicle may be sold to highest or second ranked bidder or anyone else
• Higher the bid value, lower the settlement cost to be paid by insurer to the owner
• We put the owner, buyer in touch, help them with basic documentation etc. but not in terms of re-registration, delivery

We are re-building the website, slated for launch late 2024, to solve to the following limitations

1.       Legacy auction site is not optimized for mobile. Buyer MAU stagnant for past 3 years. Buyer engagement (no. of bids/Vehicle) declining heavily despite increasing vehicle supply.

2.       40% of our traffic comes from mobile, for a site that is not optimized for mobile at all.

3.       Unable to deliver much additional value to customers due to the limitations of the website including but not limited to

a.       Performance

b.       Legacy tech stack

c.       Clunky UX

                                                                              i.       Users are forced to manually refresh the screen to load new vehicles)

                                                                           ii.        Users can easily miss key events such as their favorite vehicle arriving, expiring

                                                                         iii.        Users lack in-app visibility into the process post-auction. They only receive emails today.

d.       Only 5% listed vehicles are actually sold to buyers.

e.       Zero value differentiation. We are maintaining our business only due to brand, nothing else.

While we acknowledge that re-building the site from scratch is much more time-consuming and expensive compared to licensing a similar site online and customizing it, we don’t want to risk exposing such critical area of our business to 3^rd parties while we also have proprietary data and tech assets in-house that we could leverage to differentiate based on value vs. competition – while that is hard to achieve by fully relying on 3^rd parties.

User journey components

MVP

A responsible web app (preferably a PWA to provider users as close a UX to that of native, while also leveraging capabilities such as push notifications)

• Header menu
• • Live auctions
  • My bids
  • Discarded
• Login page - Login using email id and password
• Home page - Live auctions : List all auctions in progress
• • Filters - side bar (left)
  • Featured filters (with user-configurable settings)
  • Vehicles in grid and list mode
  • Bid box that validates input bid value on click (bid confirmation) and accepts validated bid value (bid acceptance)
• My bids - Auctions in which the buyer participated by placing at least 1 bid
• • Ongoing : Auctions that are still in progress
  • Concluded : Auctions that have already ended
• Discarded - Auctions that have been discarded by the user (using the delete icon), could be restored from this page to the home page or my bids pages.
• Account settings : Bind the login email id with legacy login id (1 to many possible)
• User settings : Configurable settings for users
• • Distance from vehicle
  • Expiring soon
  • Distance units in KM or MI
• Vehicle details : For each vehicle that the buyer clicks on, a details page with vehicle spec, detailed damage info, vehicle location map etc. is available.
• Search bar : Search and filter by make, model, object ID

Future versions

• Notifications : Help users not miss any key event
• • In-app and email notifications on
  • • Arrival of new, favorite vehicles
    • Outbidden vehicles
    • Favorite vehicle about to expire
  • Push notifications (leveraging PWA capabilities)
• My vehicles : Track status of the vehicle after the bidder is awarded the vehicle by the insurer with owner consent) from sold to delivered, if applicable, in the respective country
• Show videos, in addition to photos, of damaged vehicles.
• Integrations
• • Visual intelligence (AI) API to list undamaged parts and prices automatically.
  • Payments from buyers (bank-to-bank, paypal/similar apps)

Value delivery and data

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Decode the tech layer

Most of the features listed above need data to be fetched, inserted, updated or deleted from the DB, so building a new PWA for auctions surely is a high-effort undertaking that involves multiple layers.

Front-end

·       Building a PWA with React framework that delivers great UX on any modern browser on both desktop and mobile devices.

API interface

·       .NETcore, compatible with the .NET ecosystem of legacy apps that the new SPEEDonline app needs to be in sync with.

·       REST APIs chosen as modern industry standard.

·       Micro-services architecture chosen built within Microsoft Orleans framework for . One service per entity. E.g.

o   Markets service (which markets is the customer eligible to participate in auctions for)

o   Participants service (list of valid customer ids bound to their email addresses)

·       GraphQL not chosen as there are hardly any specific queries to perform

·       gRPC calls within services between networks

·       Websockets to automatically inform customers regarding

o   New vehicles

o   Best bid flag

o   Outbidden flag

·       Microsoft Orleans is used to manage state and behavior, optimizing for performance and scalability.

API gateway

·       Kong

CDN

·       N/A

DB

·       DBs for new app : Mongo (non-structured data), SQLserverDB (Structured data)

·       DB for legacy apps that need to be in sync real-time with the new app : Oracle

Queues

·       For async processing  Oracle queues per data point

Message bus

·       RabbitMQ to manage queues

Hosting

·        Hosted on private cloud (Tanzu) for scalability, security and performance Vs. legacy apps hosted on VMs on own hardware that was hard to scale.

Devops

1.       Docket, Kubernetes used for continuous deployment

Detail out nuances and tradeoffs

Tradeoffs

·       UX : Minimize no. of API calls from FE to BE (E.g. the idea to show live counters for featured filters was shelved)

·       Security : AzureB2C was integrated into the app to switch the user from numeric id/password based login to email based login. Email could be bound to multiple user ids. This is possibly going to degrade UX but is a necessity from a security perspective.

·       Third party components : Given the complexity and critical nature of the app, all components were built in-house.

·       Cache :

·       REST Vs. GraphQL : Using REST as there are no specific/nested read queries needed.

·       Benefits of choosing this stack

o   As close to native-app like experience as possible with  PWA

o   Scalable and secure - private cloud

o   Reliable, real-time messaging, async processing, fault tolerance – websockets, message bus

o   Modern API standards

o   Cross-platform - .NETcore

·       Potential pitfalls of choosing this stack

o   Latency due to multiple network calls, logic complexity

o   Requires knowledge/proficiency in multiple tools, frameworks

Nuances

·       This new tech stack blends very well with the legacy stack of the rest of the apps.

·       Level of security : High. No client-side data storage in this case.

·       No need to re-validate client-side logic on server-side. Most logic is on server-side anyway

·       Mandatory 3^rd party integrations

o   Bingmaps integration to show location (zipcode-level) based map of vehicle location to bidders participating in the auction

·       Browser compatibility : Being built as a PWA, gyroscope API is the only relevant device API that we are interested in, right now. For future versions, camera, microphone and location APIs will also be needed.

·       Optimized for mobile : The web app is being built to deliver excellent UX on all modern web browsers, all devices to make sure

o   That we deliver great experience to the 20% mobile user base

o   Grow mobile usage from 20% to 40% in 6 months post-launch, to improve buyer engagement (bid from anywhere)

Third party integrations

Consumer side

As a consume of bingmaps, we are interested in displaying vehicle location map (zip-code level only) to the buyer interested in bidding in the auction in the vehicle details page and in the future under “My vehicles” page.

We license bing maps from an approved licensor and comply with the following terms:

-            Accessible via Oauth

-            Has required resources

-            Our requirement is to only READ from the API and display the map.

-            Accessible as an API (sync)

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