ABOUT PROJECT
Rosella Street, a groundbreaking creation by Roobykon, stands as a testament to innovative sustainable commerce. This environmentally-driven online sharing marketplace, which started its journey in 2019 and had its first users in 2020, is revolutionizing the way individuals, organizations, and councils approach buying, selling, and sharing goods. In its essence, Rosella Street is dedicated to reducing waste and promoting a circular economy, with a bold commitment to decrease landfill waste by 5% in each community it serves. The platform goes beyond mere transactions, allocating 1% from every sale to support community and environmental initiatives, thereby fostering a sense of collective responsibility.
By extending the lifecycle of items and materials, Rosella Street greatly minimizes environmental impact, illustrating its commitment to sustainability in every transaction. Behind this visionary environmental marketplace are co-founders Mick Fritschy and Sammy Williamson, whose passion for environmental stewardship and community connection drives Rosella Street’s mission. The teamwork between Roobykon and Rosella Street is characterized by a design-driven approach, ensuring that every feature aligns perfectly with Rosella Street’s vision and user needs. Key to this process is Alicia Zhou, the Operations Manager at Rosella Street, who spearheads the design efforts. Her designs serve as the foundation for each new feature or improvement. This approach ensures that the platform’s development is guided by a clear visual and functional direction from the outset.
Rosella Street demonstrates Roobykon’s commitment to creating ingenious solutions that address pressing environmental challenges and fostering community engagement and sustainable practices.
Key Challenges
The Roobykon team encountered several significant challenges when taking over the Rosella Street upgrading project in November 2023. Initially, familiarizing ourselves with the existing codebase and architecture proved time-consuming, as the project had been started by a different development team. This transition required careful study and analysis to understand the system’s intricacies and design decisions. We faced compatibility issues when integrating new features with the existing platform. The original codebase utilized older technologies and frameworks, necessitating careful consideration of how to implement modern solutions without disrupting the core functionality.
Scaling the platform for environmental protection to accommodate growing user demand while maintaining performance was another key focus. This required optimizing database queries, implementing caching mechanisms, and refining the overall system architecture. Despite these challenges, our team at Roobykon has made significant progress in upgrading Rosella Street, enhancing its functionality, security, and scalability to better serve its growing community of environmentally conscious users.
TECHNOLOGY STACK
Solution Highlights
The team at Roobykon Software leveraged a range of robust solutions to create Rosella Street. For seamless payment processing, Stripe Connect was implemented to ensure secure and reliable transactions between users and vendors. AWS EC2 served as the backbone for hosting the platform’s servers, ensuring high availability and flexibility, while AWS RDS facilitated efficient database hosting to manage the marketplace’s growing data needs. To handle file storage, AWS S3 was integrated, providing reliable and scalable object storage for user-generated content such as images and documents.
User experience was enhanced with the integration of Facebook and Google authentication for easy login and sign-up processes. The Mapbox API was utilized to enable search by location, providing users with a dynamic map to easily find items in their area. Sendgrid powered the custom email functionality, keeping users informed with personalized notifications. To further enhance security, Twilio was used for phone verification, adding an additional layer of user identity protection. Together, these technologies formed a solid foundation for creating a secure, intuitive, and efficient platform for Rosella Street.
The process
01
Project takeover and assessment: In November 2023, Roobykon acquired access to the Rosella Street project. We conducted an extensive audit of the existing codebase, architecture, and documentation. This involved deep dives into the system’s structure, identifying technical debt, and assessing the scalability of current solutions. We also held meetings with Rosella Street stakeholders to understand their vision and pain points.
02
Feature implementation and code refactoring: Our development team began implementing new features and refactoring existing code. This stage involved writing clean, efficient code that aligned with modern best practices while ensuring compatibility with the existing system. We focused on improving performance, enhancing security, and adding new functionalities requested by Rosella Street. Regular code reviews and pair programming sessions were conducted to maintain high code quality.
03
Rigorous testing and quality assurance: Upon completing each feature or refactoring task, we deployed changes to our staging environment. Our QA team then conducted thorough testing, including functional testing, performance testing, and security audits. We used automated testing tools alongside manual testing to ensure comprehensive coverage. Any bugs or issues discovered were logged and prioritized for immediate addressing by the development team.
04
Verification from the customer’s side: We presented the updated platform to Rosella Street stakeholders for review. This involved demonstrating new features, explaining technical improvements, and discussing how changes aligned with their business goals. We gathered detailed feedback, including usability concerns and feature refinement suggestions. Our team then worked on incorporating this feedback, making necessary adjustments to ensure the upgrades met stakeholder expectations.
05
Final verification and pre-deployment preparations: After integrating feedback and fixing identified issues, we conducted a final round of testing. This included regression testing to ensure new changes didn’t negatively impact existing functionality. We also performed load testing to verify the shared marketplace’s ability to handle increased user traffic. Simultaneously, we prepared detailed deployment plans, including rollback strategies in case of unforeseen issues.
06
Production deployment and monitoring: Following a carefully orchestrated deployment plan, we pushed the updates to the live Rosella Street marketplace. This process was typically scheduled during off-peak hours to minimize disruption. Our team monitored the deployment in real-time, ready to address any issues immediately. Post-deployment, we conducted thorough checks across all system components and actively monitored user interactions and system performance.
Main Features
Space-type listings and related transaction process
This feature allows users to create and manage rental space listings with specific availability plans and pricing structures. The process includes applying base and hourly rates, handling discounts, and ensuring accurate booking availability. The team addressed various bugs and ensured functionality, particularly for the Sydney/Australia time zone.
The rich text integration
Roobykon implemented the rich text formatting feature for Rosella Street, incorporating an input system with emoji support across several key pages. This integration was applied to the “Add Listing” and “Rules” pages, ensuring that rich text formatting is visible on the Listing View page. Additionally, the feature was extended to the Create/View Community Post pages and Comments pages on the Hey Fritz platform. Users can paste clickable links directly, with a snippet image appearing automatically. The ‘add a link’ option was modified to show ‘Text to display’ and set links to open in a new window by default.
Paypal payments integration
While PayPal is offered as a payment method, all payments are ultimately processed through Stripe Connect. PayPal serves as a gateway through which funds are received, and then these payments are transferred to Stripe Connect for processing and settlement. This feature simplifies the checkout process for users by providing reliable payment options for their one-time purchases. Additionally, the platform is designed to handle both logged-in and guest users, with functionalities for immediate transaction confirmations, proper handling of payment disputes, and comprehensive customer support features.
Invoicing tool for vendors
This tool in the Natuja marketplace was designed to meet German and EU VAT standards. It allows vendors to generate legal invoices, with Sharetribe admins assigning VAT rates to product categories while vendors can override these rates on individual products. Vendors can also choose to operate with or without a VAT ID and toggle the invoicing feature on or off based on their preferences for handling invoices directly with clients.
Rosella Street for business functionality
This feature was introduced to create a separate signup page for business users, ensuring proper redirection for social signups, and developing a distinct business profile page with unique backend calls for cover images and user-generated tags. We also introduced a step-by-step wizard for business account setup, integrated geolocation options, and ensured a consistent display of business account names across the platform. Additional features covered setting up and managing shopfronts and physical store profiles, creating and managing coupons, and others.
Newsletters capability
Users can adjust their settings to receive daily or weekly newsletters or switch them off entirely through the Notifications settings interface. If enabled, the system triggers an email containing up to ten public posts and ten listings published during the selected period, using a pre-existing email template. The email footer includes an unsubscribe link directing users to the Notifications settings to turn off newsletters. Initially, all users are set to receive daily updates by default, with the option to change their preferences as needed.
Redesign based on the designs provided by the customers
This involved a thorough overhaul of the platform’s visual identity and user interface. Roobykon’s team translated the provided designs into a fully functional, responsive web application. This process required careful attention to detail, ensuring that every element of the new design was accurately implemented across all pages and components of the marketplace.
Dynamic follower update
Roobykon executed this part to ensure that the correct profile image and name were displayed on the following page after any profile updates. Additionally, we addressed UI improvements by increasing the visibility of the Follow/Unfollow buttons on mobile devices, changing the notification from ‘You have not subscribed to anyone yet’ to ‘You have not followed anyone yet’ when there were no followed users, and modifying the placeholder text to ‘Search people who follow you’ on the ‘Followers’ tab to differentiate it from the ‘Following’ tab.
RESULTS
The collaboration between Roobykon and Rosella Street has yielded significant positive outcomes, elevating the marketplace’s functionality, user experience, and overall performance. Through dedicated effort and technical expertise, Roobykon has successfully transformed Rosella Street into a more robust, user-friendly, and efficient platform. One of the most notable achievements has been the successful implementation of the redesign. This overhaul has not only refreshed the visual appeal of the website but has also greatly enhanced its usability. Users now enjoy a more intuitive interface, making it easier to navigate the marketplace, list items, and complete transactions.
The introduction of the new pricing model has been another crucial development. This feature has optimized Rosella Street’s revenue generation capabilities while maintaining its commitment to sustainability and fair trade. Moreover, the ongoing support and continuous improvement approach adopted by Roobykon has ensured that Rosella Street remains at the forefront of sustainable online marketplaces. Regular updates, bug fixes, and performance optimizations have contributed to a smoother, more reliable user experience.
Lessons from Rosella Street
Among the insights that evolved during the upgrading of the Rosella Street marketplace, perhaps the most crucial one is the importance of flexibility and adaptability when taking over an existing project. Inheriting a codebase developed by another team presented unique challenges, requiring us to quickly familiarize ourselves with the existing architecture and make informed decisions about integrating new features while maintaining system stability. This experience has honed our ability to analyze and work with diverse codebases efficiently.
We’ve also deepened our understanding of the specific requirements for environmentally-focused platforms. Developing features for Rosella Street has taught us how to effectively balance user experience with sustainability goals. This knowledge is invaluable for future projects in the growing field of eco-friendly tech solutions. The implementation of complex features like space-type listings and the new pricing model has enhanced our skills in creating flexible, scalable systems. We’ve learned to anticipate and address potential issues in multi-faceted features, particularly when dealing with time-sensitive operations across different time zones.
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