Development of a Bid-Based Creative Crowdsourcing Platform with Integrated User Management and Payment Processing

A growing online platform faces challenges in providing a seamless, secure, and scalable environment for businesses to run creative competitions and for professional designers to participate, submit work, and receive payments. Difficulties include role-based access control, contest management, secure payment handling, and facilitating user engagement through voting and community feedback, all contributing to suboptimal user experience and limited growth potential.

A digital marketplace platform serving businesses and freelance creative professionals, facilitating creative project competitions, submissions, and transactions.

• Design and implement a dual-role marketplace system supporting customers and designers with role-specific access controls.
• Develop customizable contest management features, including the creation of briefs, setting of prizes, confidentiality options, and contest lifecycle management.
• Create a tailored dashboard for users to manage projects, evaluate submissions, communicate, and finalize contest results.
• Integrate secure payment processing capable of handling customer payments and designer payouts with fraud detection and encryption.
• Implement mechanisms for community voting and external opinion gathering to enhance engagement and brand awareness.
• Ensure platform scalability, responsive performance, and compliance with industry security standards.

• Role-based authentication and authorization differentiating customer and designer functionalities
• Contest creation workflows including brief submission, prize setting, NDA protections, and campaign visibility controls
• Designer submission interfaces with multi-category browsing and real-time notification systems
• An intuitive dashboard for managing contests, submissions, and communications
• Finalization procedures including source file transfer, legal agreements, and rating systems
• Secure payment gateway with identity verification, fraud detection, and encryption, supporting multiple payment methods
• Voting module enabling offline PDF download, third-party widget integration, and email-based voting invitations

• PayPal API for payment processing
• Third-party voting plugins or custom integrations for external voting sites
• Email service providers for invitations and notifications
• Analytics tools like Google Analytics for user behavior tracking

• Platform must support at least 10,000 concurrent users with minimal latency
• Secure handling of personal and financial data with SSL and encryption standards
• Fraud detection mechanisms integrated into payment processing
• Responsive design optimized for web and mobile devices
• High system availability and uptime, targeting 99.9% availability

The new platform aims to significantly improve user engagement by streamlining contest creation, submission, and voting processes, leading to increased participation. By integrating secure payments and comprehensive management tools, it is expected to facilitate faster project completion and higher satisfaction. Target metrics include supporting over 8,000 contests and 150,000 active designers within the first year, along with a measurable lift in user conversion rates and transaction security standards.