Luxury Resale & Auction Marketplace
Project Overview
We’re building a full‑stack auction marketplace that digitises the entire luxury‑collectibles trade, turning every rare watch, artwork and piece of jewellery into a live data point. Sellers upload lots in minutes, while our Next.js front‑end streams bid activity through WebSockets to a Django‑backed cloud, delivering millisecond‑level updates to collectors anywhere in the world. AI models verify authenticity and provenance, replacing manual appraisal chains with instant, traceable reports. Escrow‑protected payments—powered by Stripe Connect with optional crypto—remove settlement risk, and a seller CRM tracks reserve pricing, consignment fees and payouts in real time. On the buyer side, watch‑lists, auto‑bid rules and mobile push alerts keep high‑value clients engaged throughout the auction. Under the hood, Postgres and Redis capture bid velocity and GMV, feeding an analytics layer that surfaces cohort spend, heat‑maps of bidding spikes and multi‑sale performance trends. Scheduled PDF/Excel exports and web dashboards give galleries, dealers and estate houses a single pane of glass for compliance and finance. Designed for scale on AWS S3 + CloudFront, the platform can roll out white‑label instances for multiple auction houses with minimal set‑up—cutting operational overhead and expanding global reach faster than traditional auction tech.
Technology Stack
JavaScript
Python
CSS
django
Application Showcase
Challenge
- Replace fragmented auction workflows with a single real-time platform: millisecond-level bid visibility, escrowed settlements, and audit-friendly exports for finance/compliance.
- Authenticate at scale: move from manual provenance checks to automated, model-driven verification for luxury watches, art, and jewelry.
- Serve global, high-value buyers with watchlists, autobidding, and push alerts—without sacrificing performance or reliability.
- Enable multi-tenant/white-label rollouts for multiple auction houses with minimal setup and predictable costs.
Our Solution
- Real-time core: Next.js front end streaming bid activity over WebSockets into a Django cloud backend; PostgreSQL + Redis capture bid velocity, GMV, and state for instant UI updates.
- Trust & payments: AI models generate authenticity/provenance reports; Stripe Connect escrow (optional crypto) removes settlement risk and streamlines payouts.
- Seller/Buyer UX: seller CRM for reserves, consignment fees, and payouts; buyer watch-lists, auto-bid rules, and mobile push to sustain engagement across live sales.
- Analytics & ops: dashboards + scheduled PDF/Excel exports; cohort spend, bidding-spike heat maps, and multi-sale trends for data-driven decisions.
- Scale & delivery: assets on AWS S3 + CloudFront; white-label instances to clone and configure new auction houses quickly. Built by 2 specialists in ~3 months.
Results
Millisecond-level bidding with resilient streaming and instant UI feedback increases bidder confidence and liquidity.
Lower risk, higher trust: automated authenticity + escrowed payments accelerate settlement and reduce disputes.
- Operational clarity: finance/compliance teams get one pane of glass with exports and deep analytics (GMV, cohort spend, spike heat-maps).
- Fast scale-out: white-label architecture rolls out to multiple houses with minimal overhead—ready for global growth.