Auction Portal Development with Real-Time Data Monitoring Capabilities

To meet the customer’s requirements of enabling real-time bidding, negotiations and data synchronization across auction participants, Iflexion’s team went for the matrix-based auction model. When implemented, the online auction portal was able to process thousands of indicators that were trackable in real time. 

The web portal automates the full cycle of B2B auctioning, with the opportunity to simultaneously trade multiple groups of products in different locations and negotiate with bidders without leaving the platform. It supports a variety of auction types, including Simple Matrix, Advanced Matrix, English Reverse, and Japanese auctions. 

Before getting down to the auction portal development, our team structured all the functions by user roles and implemented them accordingly:  

• Hosts, who are typically procurement managers, determine auction rules and settings, specify products for trading, and invite participants. Hosts can also monitor all incoming bids and bidders’ details in the Negotiation Dashboard, and select the winner(s) with the help of special pop-up hints.
• Co-hosts help Hosts to communicate with auction participants via online chats, yet they have limited access to the auction settings.
• Bidders, who are typically product or service vendors, participate in auctions by placing their bids in the special Bid Point area of the portal.
• Observers monitor auctions, communicate with other users via online chats yet don’t have access to the auction settings and can’t place their bids. 
• Administrators manage the portal on the customer’s side and have full access to the system settings.

The portal features dedicated profile management modules, where the portal users can enter and update information about their companies as well as add their branded visuals such as logos and banners.

We built a range of features into the portal, allowing hosts to set up auctions and invite participants to place bids. This includes:

• Setting up general parameters: title, category, format, type (open or by invitation only), currency, publication time, start/end time.
• Designing auction matrices: specifying the products, categories and groups; inputting custom total price calculation formulas; opening bids for each product in each group.
• Uploading files with relevant information for auction participants.
• Selecting auction participants.
• Drafting and sending invitation letters to participants via email with read receipts enabled.
• Monitoring invitation acceptance rates.

In addition to the auction setup features, we also introduced full-cycle auction management workflows for hosts and bidders. This includes:

• Accepting bids and refreshing the matrix in real time.
• Displaying the details of selected lots.
• Communicating with hosts and auction participants via online chats.
• Reviewing the bidding history.
• Looking up real-time price changes visualized as charts.
• Determining the auction winner according to a range of indicators (e.g., vendors offering the lowest price, choosing the current vendor over a new one, etc.).

For this auction portal development, Iflexion used Ruby on Rails, Nginx as the web server/load balancer, and Passenger as the application server. This allowed our developers to maximize the flexibility and scalability of the system as well as ensure fast-paced delivery of static resources and dynamic content to end users. 

We developed the presentation layer using HTML, CSS, and jQuery, and enabled real-time data synchronization of the client-side application and the server with the help of Faye. Elasticsearch provided for advanced full-text search capabilities. The database layer was built on MySQL with Redis and MemCached to speed up the database-driven application.

The application was also integrated with a range of external systems:

• A custom module, specially developed for this project, that handles user authentication, user data storage, and access rules management, as well as hosts the user home page aggregating and displaying information from various connected subsystems.
• A data reference module for populating auction fields with specific values.
• The RFI database recording potential vendors who respond to the Hosts’ requests for information.
• The RFP database storing the vendors’ responses to the Hosts’ requests for proposals and containing information to be considered at the winner-picking stage.
• SnapEngage and Freshdesk for customer support.