FixMyGaff

FixMyGaff is a live Irish home-improvement marketplace built to do more than collect leads. A React quote wizard turns vague job descriptions into structured requests with guide-price ranges, Eircode context and photos. Approved tradespeople pay credits to join a capped shortlist — not an unlimited lead dump — then message, schedule, complete work and collect reviews inside moderated workflows. Customers can post jobs and compare offers today; tradesperson onboarding and admin moderation run on the same production platform.

Challenge

Typical lead-gen sites sell the same enquiry to many tradespeople at once, with little job context and no completion loop. Homeowners struggle to describe repair work clearly; tradespeople waste credits on vague or stale jobs; regulated trades need proof before bidding. FixMyGaff needed a marketplace that guides customers, caps competition, gates credentials and carries jobs through to completion — not just a contact form with a directory bolted on.

Platform Architecture

The active marketplace runs on PHP 8 with MySQL, session-hardened entrypoints and role-aware access for customers, tradespeople and admins. The public quote wizard is a React app (Laravel Mix + Webpack) that talks to PHP APIs for classification, structured interviews, estimates and checkout. OpenAI powers classification, interview copy, guide estimates and OCR onboarding; Pinecone handles vector retrieval for materials and the public RAG chatbot; Stripe handles credit purchases; Twilio sends WhatsApp lead alerts.

AI Quote Wizard

Customers start with free text or category tiles. The wizard classifies the job, asks domain-specific follow-up questions (plumbing, electrical, roofing and more), routes unsafe, regulated or oversized scopes to a written-offer path, and produces non-binding guide-price ranges where appropriate. Multi-job bundling lets one session cover several home tasks. Eircode validation, service-area checks, photo uploads and travel bands feed into checkout before the job enters moderation. This is an example of the practical workflow design covered by the LaraWeb Agentic Capabilities service.

Capped Marketplace & Credits

Instead of selling unlimited leads, FixMyGaff limits pending offers per job (default three, admin-configurable). Tradespeople buy credit bundles through Stripe and spend one to three credits when submitting an offer — paying to enter the customer shortlist, not only when they win. A fair-queue invite system rotates eligible tradespeople, with Pro Badge accounts ordered first in candidate batches. Customers get a 48-hour decision window and stale-job protection pauses jobs that go quiet.

Tradesperson Onboarding & Trust

Signup supports manual profiles or OCR quick-start: upload a trade card or certificate and OpenAI vision extracts RGI, RECI, OFTEC, Safe Pass and related fields. Email verification, insurance uploads, service-area selection and admin review unlock bidding. Company accounts must nominate a verified responsible person for credentialed jobs — stored as a snapshot on each bid. Job-specific credential gates block unqualified offers before credits are spent.

Customer Journey

Registered customers manage jobs through dashboard states — open, offers waiting, accepted, scheduled, completed and disputed. They compare capped offers, message tradespeople before acceptance (contact details redacted until an offer is chosen), accept one winner, propose or confirm appointment dates with ICS export, confirm completion or report issues, and leave token-based reviews. Support paths cover blocked jobs, refunds and account help.

Messaging, Scheduling & Completion

In-platform messaging prevents phone and email leakage before acceptance. After a customer accepts, direct contact details are released. Tradespeople propose dates; customers accept or reschedule from a calendar view. Completion flows require tradesperson sign-off, customer confirmation or dispute, then review collection. External review URLs can be submitted for admin verification before display on profiles.

Admin, Moderation & Operations

Admins approve jobs and accounts, inspect spam scores, manage disputes and support cases, configure offer caps and credit bands, review AI estimate rows, import supplier pricing, monitor notification retries and run database backups. Trust and quality dashboards surface risk signals. Credit refunds for poor lead quality are admin-reviewed — losing offers are not auto-refunded, which protects marketplace integrity.

Security & Edge Cases

CSRF tokens, role checks, rate limiting, honeypots, reCAPTCHA, duplicate job fingerprinting and contact-leakage prevention run across signup, quote APIs and messaging. Upload validation, EXIF normalisation and execution blocks protect image storage. Documented QA covers logged-out job starts, full offer caps, expired windows, withdrawn offers, stale reconfirm flows, regulated-trade proof, outside-area locks and mobile coverage via Playwright contract tests.

Outcome

FixMyGaff is a working marketplace system — not a brochure site with a form. It combines AI-assisted quoting, capped paid bidding, credential gating, scheduling, completion and admin tooling in one live platform tuned to Irish home repair. Homeowners can use the quote wizard and job dashboard now; approved tradespeople browse moderated jobs, spend credits on offers and run schedules through the same app.