Travel guide in WeChat
Asian tourists get guidance and discounts abroad without leaving familiar interface
This travel guide came up as a startup idea to our client – a travel agency which organizes trips for tourists from China to Eastern and Western Europe. This travel guide should have offered help the tourist on location and also offer benefits in restaurants and shops. Such a marketplace for the niche audience looked very promising. There was a choice between building a standalone app and integration into another popular app to minimize promotion costs.
WeChat with 1 billion users and highest penetration in China became an obvious choice. The client’s marketplace is now embedded into the WeChat ecosystem and uses its infrastructure. Users can enjoy coupons and discounts, air tickets and hotels, transfers and taxis, excursions and cruise trips.
Matching and growing supply and demand is difficult yet essential existential task for every marketplace
Our client underestimated the critical role of such a balance. In addition, the promotion budget was relatively small which made questionable fast penetration rate. Building the app itself was not as challenging as its further promotion into the market.
Elegant solution with comprehensive back-end features for the best user experience and effective promotion
As a result the app received the WeChat front-end, the Java back-end and a micro-service architecture. It was integrated with tickets provider and other 3rd parties like: Booking, Uber, discount coupons and payment service provider.
To deploy, scale, and manage the application we used K8 in cloud infrastructure. On the business and usability side the app got the reporting feature, easy user authorization and history of purchases. We shared our experience on the launch phase and than supported the app when it came live.
