I own a stock marketplace called: [login to view URL] - we sell stock animation (video), stock GIFs and vectors. Current website is built on WP + WooCommerce, as it was the easiest solution when starting out. It's obviously not the best solution for scale and long-term, as it's not optimized for this, so going forward we want to start developing our own custom platform for this.
You are probably familiar with the very famous website for free images called: [login to view URL] I love how clean, simple and fast it is and I want something EXACTLY the same (well 90%, needs to be adapted a little). I see its backend is created on Django on Python, so I want the same thing as it seems to be extremely fast, scalable and works well.
So here are the main things that I'm interested in for this v1. Once that is done, I will continue to add new features constantly, but first I want a working version to beta test with real users and transition to from our current setup.
- user accounts (can see what they purchased already, change billing details, etc.)
- payment integration with PayPal, Braintree and Stripe
- coupons system
- optimized for page speed. I want this to have extremely high scores in tests, such as Pingdom, - GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights, preferably in the green. Like Pixabay.
- optimized for SEO (we'll have to discuss a little here, as I already have some decent SEO rankings and traffic and ideally would like to keep the same link structure, but open to ideas)
- image compression ability - for example integration through API with [login to view URL] (open to other ideas)
- search functionality based on title/description/tags (I have no idea how this works actually, I heard about Ajax search and ElasticSearch - I just want it to be great, open to ideas)
- product page like on Pixabay, same layout, with image/video preview, some information on the right (size, format, etc.), add to cart and a description somewhere. No need to have the like/favorite buttons, just keep the share buttons
- video preview functionality on mouse hover in shop/search pages. Because we don't want to load users with many videos on the page (this is what all competitors use as well), all search results reveal static images and on mouse hover you see a loader, then the video starts playing
- GIF preview functionality (same as above) - apart from stock animation, we also sell GIF files
- image/vector products are obviously easier
- for video product pages, the video preview should ideally be on YouTube (like our current setup), while the streaming/low res version for shop hover preview is a low filesize version on S3. I'm open to ideas here to automate the process better)
- Amazon S3 product delivery, protected links
- Google Analytics integration
- Facebook Pixel integration
- email integration (Postmark for transactional emails and ActiveCampaign for each new user of the platform)
- automated email for order confirmation, new account, etc. (all the basics)
- Captcha for user registrations to prevent bots/spammers
- basic admin dashboard where I can create new products and add them to the store (ID, title, description, parameters like format/size/length/etc varying on the TYPE of product, featured image, image preview, ZIP S3 download link, etc.)
- basic admin dashboard with sales information, orders, reports, customers, etc.
- you should be able to configure a server to make this run smoothly and fast (DigialOcean, CloudWays, Amazon, Google, whatever you think works best, I'll get it)
- migrate everything from WooCommerce existing store (products, user accounts and their orders). Is this even possible?
- cookie notice
Design can be simple and basic for everything, like on Pixabay. New features and UI can be added at a later point. For now I just want something 100% functional.
Here if you have questions!