Sellwild Marketplace

I was contacted by the owner of a leading adtech company. He had an online marketplace with a great name. At least for a designer. The problem is it was impossible to update as it was over a decade old and all the software was EOL. I was excited to greenfield something that would look and feel really professional and include a complete Checkout/Escrow/Payout funnel, as their current checkout funnel was broken, all this on a solo dev budget. My kinda gig.

The next phase of the Sellwild Marketplace was ambitious. Working with a team of 2 other devs, I coded and designed the UX for for the next decade. The site was designed to be a marketplace for anything, with a Mercari like focus on P2P shipping, anywhere in North America. Vertical video was a big part of the new push. The Vertical Videos became another adtech product to sell to their roster of publishers like iHeartRadio and many others.

We immediately vibed on the new design idea. "Think, Where the Wild-Things Are" was the direction. Standing out in a crowded app store would require a bit of whimsy and something to draw new users to the platform. It also needed to feel seemless to login, post listings and checkout via Stripe. Peer 2 Peer required a seller signup with Stripe to get paid. Realtime estimates of shipping and holding the payment until the product was delivered (essentially a Escrow service) was a fun challenge. The occassional animated animal in the UX iced the cake.

My silo was creating and maintaining the marketplace frontend using React and Next.js. The backend was the legacy PHP Lareval server on a MySQL Database, as well as AWS Lambda functions for everything from Video encoding to sending emails and uploading and using a GPT to quickly fill in additional information about the postings. We built a chat app within the marketplace and intergrated with the existing adtech scripts on 3rd party sites with mad referred traffic. The whole thing needed to feel native as you navigated the site, as the single code-based would be a Hybrid Capacitor app for the App Stores, to launch before the Holidays.