Earlier role Marketplace · Integrations
OnBuy
Seller product-import tooling for a UK online marketplace, built as part of the early engineering team in 2013 and 2014.
What it is
OnBuy is a UK online marketplace. This was employment on the early engineering team, not a Digital Smiddy client project. The screenshot shows the public marketplace as it appears now. The work below is from 2013–2014.
The business problem
A marketplace only grows if sellers can get their catalogues onto it. Product data arrives from many suppliers, in different shapes, and it has to become listings a customer can actually buy. Doing that by hand does not scale past the first handful of sellers.
The work
The main responsibility was the logic and the front-end tools for importing product data from external sellers, so a supplier’s feed could be taken into the platform. The work sat inside a bespoke PHP framework, alongside the rest of the team, on a system that had to stay fast enough for a public shop.
The role also included mentoring junior developers on that team.
Why it is here
It is the most direct example of high-volume integration work: take messy external data, check it, and make it usable inside someone else’s system. The same discipline applies to stock feeds, partner catalogues and the imports a business eventually asks for.
Technologies