Overview

Sellit is a subscription-based platform that brings together three distinct capabilities: a business directory, a digital storefront, and an AI-powered advisory layer. Businesses subscribe to create a public profile, showcase their products and services, and receive AI-generated strategic insights about their market position and opportunities.

The platform is designed for small and medium businesses that need digital visibility and intelligent guidance but cannot afford dedicated business analysts or marketing consultants.

The Problem

Most small businesses lack structured data about their own operations and competitive landscape. They rely on intuition and informal word of mouth rather than data-driven insights. At the same time, business directories offer little beyond a listing — they provide no actionable intelligence.

The challenge was to build a platform that not only provided visibility but actively generated business value through AI — and to do so on a subscription model that was economically viable for small business owners.

Solution

The system was designed around three core modules: a business profile with rich product/service catalogues, a public-facing discovery layer for buyers, and an AI engine powered by OpenAI that analyses business data to generate recommendations and insights.

Subscription tiers controlled access to AI features, analytics depth, and catalogue size — allowing the platform to scale revenue with usage without requiring per-customer customisation.

Architecture

  • Backend API: Laravel REST API handling auth, business profiles, subscription management, and AI orchestration
  • AI Integration: OpenAI API with custom prompt engineering for business analysis and recommendation generation
  • Mobile App: Flutter with Dart — single codebase deployed to Android and iOS
  • Admin Panel: Vue.js SPA for business profile management and subscription administration
  • Database: MySQL for transactional data; structured data model enabling AI context enrichment
  • Infrastructure: AWS EC2 with Docker containers, Amazon S3 for asset storage, GitHub Actions CI/CD
  • Push Notifications: Firebase Cloud Messaging for real-time business alerts and recommendation updates

Technologies

Flutter Dart Laravel PHP Vue.js MySQL OpenAI API AWS EC2 Amazon S3 Docker Firebase GitHub Actions

Key Challenges

  • AI prompt reliability: Designing prompts that generated consistently useful, business-specific insights rather than generic advice — required extensive iteration on context injection patterns
  • Subscription enforcement: Building a flexible tier system that could gate features at the API level without complex conditional logic throughout the codebase
  • Cross-platform parity: Ensuring the Flutter app delivered identical feature sets on Android and iOS, including push notification handling and in-app purchase flows
  • App store deployment: Navigating both Google Play Store and Apple App Store review processes, including compliance with content policies for AI-generated content
  • Performance at scale: AI API calls introduced latency — implemented background job processing to generate insights asynchronously and cache results

Results

  • Published on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store
  • Full subscription management with tiered access controls
  • AI-generated business analysis with historical tracking
  • Business storefront generation and public directory listing
  • Automated push notifications for insight updates and platform activity
  • Deployed on AWS infrastructure with Docker and automated CI/CD pipeline