Beauty and wellness marketplace: Securing an 84% satisfaction rate with cloud-first, modular architecture

Project overview
Missed appointments, last-minute cancellations, and bookings abandoned midway are considered the cost of doing business in the beauty and wellness industry. In addition, it is difficult to fulfill last-minute bookings or reach customers just looking for the nearest salon.
When you add all of that together, the traditional approach to appointment management forces businesses to miss revenue opportunities while incurring overhead costs.
Our client, Glamezy, decided to help businesses capture those revenue opportunities. That’s how this Australian startup came up with the idea of its B2C marketplace.
The marketplace would allow potential customers to find beauty salons and wellness centers and book appointments on the go. Businesses, in turn, could view and manage appointments and track sales in one place.
However, to transform this marketplace idea into a product that delivers value to customers and businesses, our client needed a partner ready to work with existing design mockups. So, Glamezy turned to us to implement the solution with high performance and scalability in mind.
Services

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Challenges
To deliver on its key value proposition, Glamezy needed a frontend to make searching and booking convenient and quick, with zero friction caused by slow performance or errors. That required us to embed a map view and powerful search features, all while ensuring the platform’s performance didn’t suffer.
The marketplace also had to be flexible to meet the needs of a variety of beauty salons and wellness businesses. So, versatile, customizable venue, service, and pricing management features were a must.
Glamezy needed to launch the web app alongside mobile apps on both Android and iOS without exorbitant overhead costs, as well. That guided our tech stack selection for cross-platform development.
Finally, our client also wanted the marketplace to perform well with minimal response time and latency. So, we had to optimize the application architecture for cloud deployment using the containerization approach.
Based on our extensive discovery phase, we defined business needs and the solution’s technical requirements together with our client:
Strategic business needs
01 Deploy a cross-platform app (web, Android, iOS) for a beauty and wellness marketplace tailored to the Australian market
02 Provide value to both categories of customers in the form of convenient venue search and appointment booking and management
03 Ensure the applications are fast and convenient to use across platforms
04 Beat competitor metrics in the average session duration
05 Secure a user satisfaction rate of at least 80% based on early feedback
Technical requirements
01 Develop the web and mobile applications using a cross-platform tech stack based on existing design mockups
02 Secure a task success rate of at least 78% for the marketplace’s user flows
03 Achieve a system usability scale (SUS) score of at least 70
04 Integrate the platform with Google Maps for map view and location-based search
05 Ensure a <0.5 s response time for the web and mobile apps
06 Keep the error rate under acceptable (10%) and good (5%) targets
07 Ensure at least 99.5% availability
We can help you optimize your solution’s architecture for speed and scalability even during spikes in traffic.


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Solutions
Based on our client’s design, our developer team prepared a scalable, secure, cloud-ready application architecture. We opted for React to build responsive, performance-optimized frontend. We selected Node.js for the backend, Docker for containerization, and AWS for cloud hosting and computing to implement the modular architecture.
Once our developers had transformed prototypes into fully functional products, we conducted several rounds of user testing and refined the solution in iterations.
As a result of our involvement, our client received a responsive cross-platform marketplace app accessible both via the browser and as Android and iOS apps. The marketplace encompassed two major components:
- Business tools: Venue, staff, service, pricing, and appointment management; sales analytics
- Customer-facing app: Location-based search, map view of nearby venues, appointment booking and management, online payment
Our fast, responsive frontend, powered by a high-performance backend, helped the marketplace win over early users. For example, our solution secured an 84% user satisfaction rate and a 73 system usability scale (SUS) score. The marketplace also demonstrated an average session duration 26% longer than Glamezy’s major competitor, as well as an average task success rate of 82%.
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Location-based search and map view
To enable users to quickly find nearby venues, we integrated Google Maps using a REST API. In line with Australian privacy regulations, we ensured that the location-based search doesn’t put any user data at risk while remaining convenient for customers.
We implemented this feature with performance and scalability in mind, ensuring an optimal response time for the solution. At the same time, we facilitated search with multiple sorting options and filters (desired services, date, and time).
The ease of search was the most prominently featured advantage in positive user feedback, helping the marketplace secure an 84% satisfaction rate among early users.

Appointment booking and payment
Once customers find their beauty salon or wellness center, they can select their stylist and book an appointment in several quick steps. With each booked appointment, customers also accumulate loyalty points, which helps drive user engagement and retention.
During usability testing, we identified several points of friction. We removed them by minimizing the number of actions necessary for booking, improving the task success rate to 82% as a result.
We also integrated the platform with a payment processor that accepts Visa and MasterCard payments. The REST API integration was secured to ensure that payment details remain safe in transit.

Business tools
Our client wanted the marketplace to provide a robust toolkit for various businesses across the beauty and wellness industry. That meant the platform’s business tools had to meet the needs of spas, fitness centers, hair salons, and more.
We enabled businesses to add services like hair styling, nails, and massages and set custom prices per appointment or unit of time (e.g., hour). They can also easily list and manage their venues, staff, working hours, inventory, and more. At the same time, businesses can review all appointments in an intuitive calendar view for each venue, minimizing the risk of double-booking or other errors.
The ensemble of these business tools, optimized for high performance even during spikes in traffic, allowed Glamezy to secure an 84% satisfaction rate among early adopters.

Promotions and vouchers
The ability to add promotions and vouchers came up as one of the most desired features among businesses during our client’s user research. So, we implemented the functionality, all while adding customization options to meet various business needs.
During our user testing, we identified several ways to decrease the time on task for adding and managing promotions and vouchers. Our improvements reduced it by 21% compared to the first iterations. They also helped us secure a task success rate of 86% for these features.

Modular cloud-first architecture
We designed the marketplace’s architecture to maximize its performance using the modular microservices approach with cloud deployment in mind. We selected the AWS cloud to host the solution based on our client’s financial, performance, and availability requirements.
Our modular architecture and iterative performance enhancements brought the response time under 0.3s. Cloud deployment, in turn, enabled 99.9% availability. Our comprehensive testing ensured the average error rate (5%) remained under acceptable and reasonable goals.

Tech stack
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Impact
Our involvement in the project helped our client reap a number of benefits, including:
Our experts can design and implement a modular, cloud-first architecture optimized for performance and scalability.


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