// Development
HomeAdvisor Clone: How to Create a Tradesmen Website like HomeAdvisor?
// Development
Every day a lot of people bump into the necessity to fix something in their house or apartment, improve their smallholding, etc. It often happens that people can’t find a good specialist quickly because not all specialists can afford to have a separate website. A HomeAdvisor platform was created for them. Due to this resource, homeowners can directly contact specialists and choose one, who has a proper level of qualifications to perform a specific work. Also, specialists present themselves and their own services. In this article, we’ll unveil the secret of the success of this resource and talk about how to create a similar website.
Rodney Rice and Michael Beaudoin founded this web resource back in 1998. The platform was called ServiceMagic then. The objective of this project was to set up communication between homeowners and specialists, who provide services in repair, maintenance, and home improvements. When the clients go to the site, they can view project costs or choose a specialist, etc. All specialists, who are offering their services, are passing a pre-check (including criminal records or bad financial history).
HomeAdvisor bought Angie's List (an American website of home services that was founded in 1995) in 2017 and the company was named ANGI Homeservices.
At the moment, it’s the largest international website that connects homeowners with specialists. Statistics are truly impressive.
The project has several sources of revenue.
Let’s puzzle out the technical part of the website creation. Three sections are important here: for homeowners, for tradesmen (businesses), and for admins. Let’s review all these features in more detail.
First and foremost, let’s consider what features for homeowners should be there.
1. Search
This feature is very important because a potential target audience will be making a decision about further usage of this website based on it. Before the registration procedure, a person visits the resource to get familiar with it. The user should see a swift and robust search with necessary filters by type of service, area, rating, price, etc. to conclude that the platform suits him. For a more precise search, you can equip the system with a matching algorithm that will use a combination of search attributes to narrow down the results list.
2. Pre-qualification.
To save time and the nerve of its clients, the HomeAdvisor website provides pre-qualification checks for clients. It allows reducing the number of calls from competitors, who just want to know tradesmen’s prices, and people, who have nothing better to do. The client is required to provide some information (email, physical address, description of the required job, photos, and sketches). If the system cannot identify the client as reliable, it does not proceed with the request to the Pros.
3. Client’s profile.
After a successful pass of the pre-qualification process, the system creates the client’s profile; where all the contact information and requests for jobs are stored.
4. Video messaging.
Coronavirus made some adjustments to business. For this reason, HomeAdvisor released new features for contactless communication and payments in April 2020. Once principal conditions are agreed on, a homeowner and a tradesman can start a video chat to discuss the order details.
5. Order booking.
Some websites allow clients only to see the information about a specialist/business and their contact info. And for HomeAdvisor, it’s possible to book professionals directly from the website. On receiving the request for an appointment, the pro can either confirm, cancel, or send back up to three options of available time slots (to meet and discuss the project) to choose from. There’s also a possibility to schedule an appointment for the same day.
6. Contactless payment.
Statistics show that more than 50% of consumers pay specialists in cash. The HomeAdvisor platform gives the possibility for contactless transactions. At the same time, the platform now can regulate all the payments for the services. Besides, there is a feature of tips for especially meticulous Pros after a job is complete.
7. Сalculator.
As is well known, the estimated cost of the job differs significantly from the final one very often. It’s recommended to develop a special calculator to calculate the costs of one service or another so that clients can avoid disappointment and stressful situations.
8. Ratings.
The majority of consumers of goods or services read other users’ reviews and feedback before choosing something. Perhaps it’s the strongest motivation that influences a buying decision. That’s why consumers should be able to select a technician by the ratings and other clients’ reviews. Besides, a good reputation means traffic growth as reviews are indexed by search engines and attract more consumers to your site. It is also important to timely check and moderate reviews to prevent offensive and spam ones.
9. Rewards.
You can increase the loyalty of your homeowners by rewarding them with cashback, discounts, or other goodies for writing reviews, completing projects, and other activities.
10. Blog.
You should create a blog so that it will be interesting for the users to visit the site and spend more time there. The blog can be filled with useful information on topics related to the platform and interesting articles. Good content increases the traffic on your website and uplifts your position in the searching engines.
Moreover, to warm up clients’ interest, you can add a little interactivity and gaming to the site. For example, this might be any particular resource design constructor or a board for pinning the best completed projects and creative ideas.
The website interface should be simple, user-friendly, and convenient. In addition, you can’t forget about functionalities. That’s why it’s very important to keep a perfect balance between beautiful and usable.
Don’t forget about a clone mobile app either. The majority of people prefer visiting resources via smart devices now, so this product will be very handy. You need to remember that the development for both Android and iOS will be needed to expand the user base.
You also shouldn’t forget about rewards for tradesmen and businesses. You can reward specialists for getting their ratings up with badges or icons in the profile, which can be seen by clients.
Besides the user functionalities, you need to look after how things are going from the side-scenes. Both professionals and consumers may need Admin support. In addition, it’s needed to know your audience better, upload new content, make reports, etc.
The following functionalities will be useful for management:
Talking about HomeAdvisor, its development team says that when they were starting, they created a monolithic structure for everything. And it served well until the number of users increased rapidly. As the loads were increasing and new features were emerging, the platform was getting more and more maze-like. Therefore, to improve scalability, it was decided to decouple functional capabilities.
Thus, they created the following microservices, each responsible for exact features but still effectively interact with each other. For example:
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