Creation of an online marketplace for agriculture

2001 - Launch of the future Agroru.com marketplace. All engineering is done in Perl.
The service provides the functionality of a "traditional bulletin board": a search column, a personal account for information management.

The rapid growth of the audience and the development of the product led to the need to migrate to a more appropriate advanced development language.
The codebase migrated to PHP along with hundreds of changes and improvements to the architecture, code and interface.

The name Agroportal, coined for the product, began to be used as a term describing a separate category of industry-related sites.

2002 - services were developed: ads, companies, brands... - now they are part of any marketplace.

2003 - an agro-catalog was developed - a catalog of brands, models and goods with prices and contacts of suppliers.
A prototype of future modern marketplaces.

2008 - migration of the platform's codebase to the bitrix framework.
We have gained extensive experience working with Bitrix in large and very complex products.
Subsequently, even more experience was gained in abandoning Bitrix and switching to frameworks more suitable for serious projects.

2009 - the first agricultural professional social network was created - the Agricultural Network.
The agricultural network brought together participants in the agricultural market: farmers, sellers, marketers, and production workers

One of the main problems of the agricultural market is the lack of a single convenient classifier of goods with the possibility of parameterization of goods for their convenient search and selection.
For Agroru.com the first time in the agricultural market, a universal classifier of goods and their properties was developed.
Typed properties were created for each product, which made it possible to add products with the necessary parameters and filters for these parameters to be able to select products according to criteria.

Price monitoring automatically collects the history of price changes for goods.
Provides the ability to analyze prices by product categories and specific products for a selected period in the form of graphs.
Price indicators can also be seen on the geographical map.

The classifier of agricultural goods, created by us and implemented earlier, allowed us to create such a service

The news service is one of the most important tools of the industry marketplace. Authors and editors of Agroru.com publishes analytical reviews and market news on a daily basis in the publication system.
The news service interface has different interfaces for different categories of professionals.
Materials go through several verification stages before publication.

The most important difference and advantage of the Agroru.com - 100% content moderation. All published information must be checked.
A service has been developed for moderators with different levels of rights/access.
Moderators process thousands of content objects every day. Various AI models are used to automate moderation: user qualification, automatic content verification, automatic ban of violators

Several user support tools are used. Technical support for tickets with SLA for commercial users.
Online chat support for prompt resolution of simple issues.

The growth of the product has led to the limitations of the monolithic platform. Migration to the micro-service architecture has been prepared and performed in several stages.
Migration to Laravel, creation of separate frontend and backend with REST API.
Splitting the monolith into microservices.

All the time working with the product, various monetization hypotheses were tested.
Monetization systems have been developed and integrated: online promotion services, advertising services, contextual advertising system, analytics for marketing services and users.

Separate promo sites (landing pages) have been created for commercial services.
The best lead generation mechanisms for the sales department have been tested and selected. The product effectively sells itself.

An email marketing toolkit has been created to increase commercial efficiency. Sales funnels have been prepared and tested, and sales chains have been assembled to engage users and sell services.
The result is a steady increase in the sale of online services.

For Agroru.com users has developed a contextual advertising service.
You can create text ads or connect contextual ads to ads.