TradeHook - Online Marketplace for Home Improvement Jobs
Technologies: ASP.NET Core, SQL Server, Microsoft Azure, PayPal
Background
TradeHook is our own product: an online marketplace, built and run by Engine Solutions, where homeowners post home improvement jobs and tradespeople bid for them.
The Problem
Getting a list of names is easy enough. Getting one of them to turn up is not: the tradespeople you are given are busy, booked up for months or have moved on. The online directories do not solve it either, because they charge tradespeople a monthly fee to be listed, so only a small fraction of the people who could do the job are on them.
Solution
TradeHook turns that model round. It is free for tradespeople to join, so the directory is as complete as we can make it. Posting a job costs a small fee, which keeps the jobs genuine and keeps tradespeople engaged with the platform.
- A homeowner describes the job by answering a few questions and adding photos, in one of more than thirty trade categories.
- Tradespeople in the area are notified automatically, can ask questions and submit a bid.
- Homeowners and tradespeople message each other through the site without swapping contact details.
- Bids are compared side by side, with each tradesperson's reputation and previous work on view.
- Payments are taken through PayPal.
Results
TradeHook is a working marketplace, and it is the project that shows what we do when we are the client as well as the developer: product design, the user experience for two very different audiences, bidding and notification logic, secure messaging, payments, and hosting and running the service on Microsoft Azure.