Citimagic – Journey So Far
Citimagic is a local home services app based marketplace which facilitates services like plumbing, carpentry, painting, etc. Citimagic.com and its associated apps are consumers facing products enabling customers to order services at the convenience of their home.
The entire product comprising of the web portal and mobile Apps have been designed to make it easy to use, intuitive and aesthetically pleasing. The major stakeholders of the product are end-users/customers , vendors providing the services, admin of the portal.
How did we do?
Local home services software that we built had many application components in the platform. These applications may include services listing management, content management, search, personalization and recommendation, order management, payments, review and rating, shipping and warehouse management, pricing and inventory management, fraud and risk management, email and SMS management, vendor management and much more. We also viewed this platform in terms of technology components: a user interface, a data store, a back end data processing system so on.
These were all be taken care of by using an SOA – service oriented architecture. An SOA platform is modular, distributed and decentralized; with each application, component fully isolated from any other.
These components or sub systems talk only through a well-defined API, which is exposed as a service.With an SOA structure in place, each component evolves rapidly and independently. Production problems are isolated and rectified quickly. Scaling challenges are identified and met fast.
The online solution helped the operations team at Citimagic to scale and increase their bandwidth to process higher volumes of service bookings without adding any manpower in the operations team. The effort in co-ordinating with vendors and customers got reduced manyfolds. Customers had ease of access and choice to book a service on the go, which also reflected in spike in number of orders right after the launch of portal.