B2B E-Commerce Web App | Outsourcify Web agency

Ecotrade trades and recycles waste material that contains precious metals, e.g. scrap catalytic converters. They have office locations in almost 20 countries worldwide. As Ecotrade operates in the B2B sector of e-commerce, their customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders have two main channels to interact with each other: Ecotrade web application and Ecotrade mobile application.

The Ecotrade web application was one of the first large-scale web applications we started to develop several years ago. We constantly work on improvements as part of an adaptive maintenance process. The main purpose of the web application is to offer a database of scrap catalytic converters to the users that includes all car manufacturers, real-time value and price calculation with the current commodity prices. In a typical use case, a supplier customer adds products to the shopping cart which at check-out are sold to Ecotrade.

Outside the countries of operation, Ecotrade offers subscription-based access to the database so that the subscribers can check the current prices of their scrap catalytic converters. The subscriptions are available on both the web app and the mobile app. Ecotrade Mockup

Team

1 Project Manager
1 Web Designer
1 Web Developer

Methodology

Waterfall & Agile

Tools

InVision
Adobe Photoshop
TeamWork

Technologies

Symfony, PHP, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript

Timeframe

1 year

Code sharing between Web app and mobile app

While the web app runs on technologies like HTML, CSS, and Javascript, the mobile App is developed with React Native – a Javascript framework for mobile apps, created by Facebook. Despite a completely separate front-end code, both apps interface with the same Symfony PHP back-end and access the same database. Back-end code-sharing between the two apps is, however, not complete because the code-quality compromise also involves code complexity and readability.

Localization

The content of the website and the mobile app looks different to users from different countries. In addition to content translations, different currencies, timezones, and writing systems are also supported. Even the domain name is different in different countries, which makes different country versions look and act like different websites. In a mobile environment, the current locale is determined by the user’s country.

Authentication

One of the latest additions to the Ecotrade apps is social authentication which lets users authenticate in the Ecotrade app with their Google or Facebook accounts. The feature comes with a one-click registration which skips the email verification step that has previously been completed by Facebook or Google.