Sella

Sella is NZ's second largest auction website and represents countless man hours of agile development. With over 40gb of database records, 5 million listings and half a million users, this is a platform tuned to optimally deliver results even during high load.

Sella is built on a custom PHP framework and utilises MySQL databases supplemented by the Solr search engine. Other technologies used include Google APIs, AddressFinder, PHPTal, ADODB and is built with object-oriented design as standard practice.

Over the last two years Sella has faced many challenges, including fully integrating other websites such as Zillion and Trade & Exchange, hosting weekly Grabaseat auctions and improving the Sella user experience to maintain a healthy lead in the things that Sella is good at against bohemoth competition such as TradeMe.

Trust and Safety
Nothing is more important at Sella than the security and safety of users. Sella implements a variety of anti-phishing methodologies. As the Internet has become more popular, we have seen a sharp rise in attempts at fraudulent transactions or other scams. Happily, by mapping behaviour and scam characteristics against known attacks we catch 99% of these attempts before the auction goes live. The remaining threats are detected and removed prior to contact being made by the scammer with a user.

Social Technologies
Sella makes use of Facebook integration wherever possible to deliver the best user experience. Facebook isn't just a login/registration mechanism - it's a way for users to reach more eyes.

AddressFinder and Google APIs
Location is key to Sella's auction structure. Many of Sella's user base are not typically savvy computer users and had difficulty filling out basic information. Sella uses AddressFinder and Google Geocoding to help these users map free text addresses to identified locations.

Serious Optimisation
Each day Sella closes and relists 100,000 listings, sends 160,000 emails and handles 10,000 unique visitors. There is the potential for poorly written code to impair these processes now or at some point in the future. For this reason Sella is built robustly to a worst-case-scenario plan that takes into account not just performance and data usage but also security.

Visit Sella
www.sella.co.nz