On-demand ticket booking app - NetSet Software

Bridging the digital divide to remove barriers to access to information and technology in sub-Saharan Africa.

Client

KaCyber Technologies

Industry

Ticket Booking

Technologies

Front End: Android(Kotlin),Ios(Swift 4), JSP, JavaScript, JQuery

Back End: Ruby on Rails

Database: Postgres

Third Party API: One signal, Google map APIs, AWS - EC2, RDS, SNS, S3.

KaCyber approached us with an idea to build a complete Bus ticket selling system for Nigeria. As Nigeria had some other bus ticket booking platforms but none of them had solutions for some basic challenges of Nigerian travelers and Bus operator companies, KaCyber wanted to remove all of those challenges and bring a high performance system that brings ease to travelers and full control to Bus operators.

As an emerging Internet company, KaCyber is only 1% finished. KaCyber's dedication for customer-centric innovation based on trending technologies and creation of strategic partnerships with NetSet to develop a solution with aim of establishing a connection between people and businesses they love.

The Problem

As KaCyber wanted to provide a very quick and user friendly journey for users to book their tickets for their very specific pick-up and drop-off points and also to provide an ease with making payments with having multiple options in app to make online payments or to select cash option and pay at POS point and get their ticket.

Seat Structures :

When it comes to online ticket booking, everyone prefers to get their preferred seat in the bus, and as Nigeria had numerous different types of buses each having some different kind of seat layouts and even some of them having special seats, it was really a challenge to find some efficient solution for this.

Route and pick-up and drop-off locations :

When it came to defining route of buses and also marking up pick-up and drop-off location, the challenge here was that in Nigeria, buses those travel in short routes have too many pick-up and drop-off points and KaCyber do wanted to provide an option to each Bus operator to define exact set of all pick-up and drop-off for each route of their bus.

Pricing and Seat availability :

As normal bus routes consist of multiple pick-up and drop-off points, the pricing of ticket was required to be defined very precisely so that a traveler should be only charged on the basis of distance of their journey. Same was for seat availability, a seat should be shown available for a person whose pick-up location is same to some already traveling person’s drop-off location.

Speed and Security :

As the system involved online payments and ticket validations through POS, security was also a concern and as there can be large number of users booking tickets at same time, system is required to be at high performance and speed.

The Challenges

Security of user’s information

Based on the user types (admin and registered users), all members who log into the app have to provide login credentials. Therefore, the security of user info was a critical challenge in the project; it is also very important that the information shared will not to be used by other sources.

Strong backend to handle future updates

Maintaining the database of the 'Beats' section of the application was challenging, since content would be uploaded into it continuously. Moreover, with the increasing user base, the backend would need to be more organized to handle the traffic.

Maintaining Roles of User

One of greatest challenges in building this application was to accommodate the functionalities of different types of users, drivers, travel operators and end users.

Scalability to Handle a Large User Base

Another major challenge was to build a platform robust in functionality with scalable architecture. Being a logistics industry application, it drew the interest of almost everyone in the sub-Saharan Africa region. Hence, scalability was a critical aspect.

The Solution

KaCyber has different components which consists of a mobile and web application to be used by end customers to book bus tickets, a web application to be used bus operators to add their buses, bus routes, journey timings, drivers etc, a POS application to be used by bus operators to validate tickets and take cash payments (if user hasn’t made payment online) and a web panel to be used super admin to manage all components of end customer app and bus operator panel.

KaCyber provides a complete control to user where they can select their seat(s), pick-up and drop-off locations. All bookings evolves online payments or payments at bus operator counter. Online payments give wide options to users.

KaCyber is not only for major bus companies or for buses which run on longer routes, it evolves local buses as well and gives complete control to bus operators to manage their pick-up and drop-off points even at close locations.

We worked with KaCyber to just get basic knowledge about seat layout of different buses in the Nigeria and then designed and defined those specific seat layouts. The bus operator only needs to select type of bus while defining the route and seat layout automatically comes up for selected bus type.

Traveling fares for users are calculated on basis of distance of their journey (distance between user’s selected pick-up and drop-off point) just like the charges need to pay if someone gets ticket manually, so that travelers do not feel that they are spending anything extra while booking their seats online.

The Result

Kacyber in Action …

Got a project in mind? Get its estimation.

Let's Talk