THE CHALLENGE

bidr® leads online livestock trading in New Zealand, allowing customers to browse and purchase livestock from the comfort of their home, whether it's through 100% online auctions, or their hybrid livestream of traditional on-farm and saleyard auctions. The live nature of these auctions means it is imperative that the technology works every time and provides a seamless "just like being there" experience for online participants - buyers and viewers.

With market demand growing, bidr® needed to ensure that its auction system software platform and hosting infrastructure would cope with the expected market growth across a range of auction formats.

OUR APPROACH

Coming on board as bid's IT vendor, Cucumber reviewed the existing architecture and technology and recommended optimisation of the bidr® system architecture using a flexible cloud-based architecture with modern technology that's scalable, configurable and easier to maintain. Cucumber completed a detailed technical analysis and architecture planning exercise alongside the bidr® team before undertaking the optimisation work.

Taking a customer-centric agile approach, ongoing design and development of new features and functionality is continually being delivered based on customer feedback and business drivers.

THE SOLUTION

The bidr® system, hosted on cloud-based Amazon Web Services (AWS), is scalable, robust and built to cope with increased market demand. Taking a microservices approach, we utilised leading technologies such as:

• .NET

• Angular

• Docker

• Kubernetes

BRIEF

Bidr wanted to build a scalable auction system, that was flexible to meet market need and ready

for growth in the market.

OUTCOMES

bidr® has an improved auction experience leading to increased customer and vendor satisfaction which resulted in a 300% increase in customer signup in just 3 months.

Architected as a cloud native application the system is able to scale for future growth expectations while being easier to support and maintain.

"We now have a fully scalable and reliable system that will allow us to aggressively grow and continue to be the leading online livestock trading platform in New Zealand. Thanks to Cucumber's full business approach, the software has been built with user experience, speed and reliability in mind." - Tania Smith, bidr® General Manager.