Buyback and Recommerce Software from the Mbicycle Team
Check how qualified experts from Mbicycle augmented the client’s team to enrich and improve their buyback and recommerce software.
Client & Context
We worked on this project together with our client’s development department. This Estonia-based company has a vast network of vendors in their region that are engaged in purchasing post-consumer equipment and electronics, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. People bring their electronics to any of these vendor stores to inspect, evaluate, and add to our client’s database by vendor experts.
According to each device’s condition, vendors either pay a certain amount of money or accept it as a set-off to buy a new appliance. Our client then repairs and restores these used devices and sells them through their large retail network.
Challenges & Requirements
The client reached Mbicycle due to positive feedback from previous clients in their region. The main task for our dedicated experts was to strengthen the client’s in-house department and help them with the development of a vendor portal functionality and expand the abilities of their main administrative web panel.
To sell gathered devices, our client has already created and configured several b2b, b2c, and other sales channels. The main challenge for the Mbicycle dedicated specialists was to develop portals for vendors that accept devices. We needed to provide vendors with efficient tools and options to create an index card for each purchased device, specify data about its characteristics, condition, and performance, arrange for its shipment to the client’s warehouse, etc.
Process
The entire project team included both qualified experts from the client’s internal departments and experienced specialists from Mbicycle, as follows:
- Four full-stack developers
- Two QA engineers
- Product Owner
- Business Analyst
During our work, the project management effectively distributed tasks among all specialists, which allowed us to solve them ahead of schedule. Experts from Mbicycle also suggested several improvements to a vendor portal’s functionality that were successfully implemented into the final solution further.
As the main development methodology, our team followed the Agile Scrum broken down into two-week sprints with daily meetings and demo sessions every two weeks also.
Solution
The main client’s software is a web platform with an administrative panel and portals for each vendor that acquiesces, checks, and purchases devices. Such vendor portals contain a variety of fields to assure quick and efficient assessment of the electronics’ condition and determine the payout amount for each device correctly.
We worked closely with the client’s in-house experts on various features to implement them into vendor portals and expand their capabilities. For instance, we made and configured the Device Grading feature, which provided a lot of options to define each device’s working performance and its final value for our client. Thus, in this tab, the vendor’s employees could indicate the state of the received electronics — whether there was original packaging or not, whether the device turns on or not, etc. We also equipped these portals with white labeling features, so that each vendor could brand them under their company name and identity.
Our specialists worked together with the client’s team also on the development and expansion of a well-thoughtful administrative panel with complex business logic, lots of integration, and interactions.
Technologies & Tools
Architecture
Microservices
Frontend
Angular 12
Backend
NET 6 (Core), ASP.NET MVC, .NET 8, ASP.NET MVC
Database
MSSQL, AWS DynamoDB, Redis
Third-party library APIs
Material UI, Bootstrap, EntityFramework, AWS Lambda
Results
Our specialists have been working together with the client’s team on this project for nine months. During this period, we have successfully implemented all the specified tasks and requirements to improve the client’s recommerce software.
Shortly, the Product Owner plans to involve our specialists in refining and expanding the Device Grading feature — we plan to add more fields and options for device evaluation, the ability to put in each device’s characteristics manually, and not choosing them from the pre-defined list, etc. In addition, the client plans to involve experts from Mbicycle in the development and improvement of another software solution that will manage the retail processes of all refurbished devices.
