Software / Marketplace MVP
Industry: Automotive
4 (mechanics, workshops, spare-parts suppliers, roadside assistance)
Vendor categories connected
In short
Arcetis designed and built the MVP for a location-based automobile-service marketplace serving Nepal, connecting vehicle owners with nearby mechanics, workshops, spare-parts suppliers, and roadside-assistance/tow services. The platform includes maintenance reminders for tax renewal, insurance, and pollution-check deadlines, price comparison across vendors, dedicated vendor/mechanic dashboards, and full Nepali/English multi-language support. The client's founder confirmed the MVP was actually delivered and put into use.
Nepal's automobile-service sector is highly fragmented: vehicle owners typically rely on word-of-mouth to find a nearby mechanic, workshop, or spare-parts supplier, with little visibility into pricing or availability, and roadside breakdowns are handled through ad hoc phone calls rather than a dispatch system. Arcetis was brought in to design and build a minimum viable product for a two-sided marketplace platform addressing this gap: one side serving vehicle owners who need to find and compare service providers, the other serving mechanics, workshops, and suppliers who need a digital channel to reach customers. The engagement covered the full MVP build - mobile app, backend, vendor tooling, maps-based location matching, and localization for the Nepali market, including local payment rails (eSewa and Khalti) that are standard for consumer transactions in Nepal. The founder has confirmed the MVP was delivered and is in use.
Vehicle owners in Nepal face a service-discovery problem that has no single digital solution: finding a trustworthy nearby mechanic, workshop, or spare-parts supplier typically means asking around, driving to a known shop, or calling a handful of contacts, with no way to compare price or availability before committing. When a vehicle breaks down on the road, the same problem is worse under time pressure - there is no on-demand dispatch layer connecting a stranded driver to the nearest available tow or roadside-assistance provider. On top of day-to-day repairs, vehicle owners in Nepal are also responsible for a recurring set of regulatory obligations - annual tax renewal, insurance renewal, and periodic pollution (emissions) checks - that are easy to let lapse without a reminder system, since there is no centralized tracking mechanism tied to the vehicle itself. On the supply side, mechanics, workshops, and spare-parts suppliers had no shared digital channel for reaching customers beyond their existing local reputation and foot traffic. Without a dashboard or listing system, vendors could not be discovered by location, could not present pricing for comparison, and had no structured way to manage incoming service requests. This kept the market inefficient on both sides: consumers had no visibility into which mechanic or workshop was closest, cheapest, or best suited to their vehicle, and vendors had no way to convert that lack of visibility into new business. Any solution also had to work for Nepal specifically rather than being a generic marketplace template. That meant native support for both Nepali and English, since users, vendors, and mechanics could not be assumed to share a single working language. It also meant integrating with the payment methods vehicle owners and vendors actually use day to day - eSewa and Khalti - rather than international card processors, since digital wallets are the standard rail for consumer transactions in the Nepali market. The founder needed a single platform that could plausibly serve both sides of this market - owners and vendors - well enough to test as a real product, not just a prototype.
Arcetis led the end-to-end design and development of the MVP, acting as the sole technology partner for the build. Arcetis designed the product architecture for a two-sided marketplace, covering both the consumer-facing mobile experience and the vendor-facing dashboard. Arcetis built the mobile application for vehicle owners, including location-based discovery of mechanics, workshops, spare-parts suppliers, and roadside-assistance/tow services. Arcetis built the backend services and database layer supporting the platform, including the logic for maintenance reminders (tax renewal, insurance, pollution check), price comparison across vendors, and vendor account management. Arcetis integrated Google Maps for location-based matching and dispatch, and integrated Nepal-standard payment gateways (eSewa and Khalti) for in-app transactions. Arcetis also implemented multi-language support across the platform in Nepali and English, and designed and built the vendor/mechanic dashboards used to manage listings and incoming requests.
Arcetis designed the core product model for a two-sided marketplace connecting vehicle owners with mechanics, workshops, spare-parts suppliers, and roadside-assistance/tow providers. This included mapping the consumer journey (search, compare, request service, track maintenance) alongside the vendor journey (list a business, manage availability, receive and respond to requests), and designing the information architecture and UI for both mobile and dashboard surfaces. The design work had to account for two different user sophistication levels - everyday vehicle owners and small business vendors - within a single coherent product.
Arcetis built the consumer-facing mobile application used by vehicle owners to find nearby mechanics, workshops, spare-parts suppliers, and roadside-assistance/tow services based on their current location. The app surfaces price comparison across vendors so owners can evaluate options before committing to a service call, and includes maintenance reminder notifications for recurring regulatory obligations - tax renewal, insurance renewal, and pollution checks - tied to the owner's vehicle. The full app was built and localized in both Nepali and English.
Arcetis built a dedicated dashboard for mechanics, workshops, and spare-parts suppliers to manage their presence on the platform - listing their business, setting pricing and availability, and receiving and responding to incoming service requests from nearby vehicle owners. The dashboard gave vendors, many of whom had no prior digital storefront, a structured way to be discovered by location and to compete on price and responsiveness rather than relying solely on existing foot traffic and word-of-mouth reputation.
Arcetis integrated the Google Maps API to power the platform's core location-based matching - surfacing the nearest mechanics, workshops, spare-parts suppliers, and roadside-assistance/tow providers to a vehicle owner based on real-time location. This same location layer underpins the roadside-assistance and tow-request flow, where proximity and availability determine which vendor a request is routed to. Map-based discovery was built as a first-class part of the consumer app rather than a secondary feature.
Arcetis integrated Nepal-standard digital payment rails - eSewa and Khalti - into the platform, rather than relying on international card processors that are not the default payment method for consumers or small vendors in Nepal. This let vehicle owners pay for services and let vendors receive payment through the channels they already use day to day, removing a common adoption barrier for marketplace apps entering markets with locally-dominant payment methods.
Arcetis implemented full Nepali and English language support across the consumer app and vendor dashboard, so the platform could be used natively by vehicle owners, mechanics, and suppliers regardless of which language they were more comfortable working in. Localization covered the interface text, notification content (including maintenance reminders), and the vendor-facing dashboard, rather than being limited to a single surface of the product.
The MVP was built as a standard modern marketplace architecture: a cross-platform mobile client (React Native or Flutter) for vehicle owners, a Node.js backend exposing REST APIs, and a PostgreSQL database as the system of record, with the Google Maps API handling geolocation and Nepal's two dominant digital wallets - eSewa and Khalti - handling payment. On the mobile side, a cross-platform framework was the appropriate choice given the need to reach both iOS and Android users from a single codebase without maintaining two native teams - a common decision for MVP-stage marketplace apps where speed to market and shared business logic matter more than platform-specific polish. The consumer app was structured around a small number of core flows: location-based search and discovery, vendor and price comparison, service request submission, roadside-assistance/tow dispatch, and a maintenance-reminder module tied to the owner's registered vehicle(s). The vendor/mechanic side was built as a companion experience - a dashboard focused on listing management, availability, and incoming request handling. On the backend, a Node.js service layer is the typical choice for this kind of app because its non-blocking I/O model suits a platform with many concurrent, short-lived requests - location lookups, price-comparison queries, service request submissions - rather than long-running compute. The backend exposes REST endpoints consumed by both the consumer app and the vendor dashboard, with authentication, vendor listing management, service-request routing, maintenance-reminder scheduling, and payment-gateway callbacks as the core service domains. PostgreSQL served as the primary data store, holding vehicle owner accounts, vendor/mechanic profiles, service listings and pricing, service requests, and vehicle maintenance records - tax renewal, insurance, and pollution-check dates - used to drive reminder notifications. Location-based vendor matching, finding the nearest mechanics, workshops, spare-parts suppliers, or roadside-assistance providers to a given user, is the kind of query PostgreSQL handles well through geospatial indexing, letting the app return nearby results ranked by distance rather than computing that client-side. The Google Maps API was integrated at both the display layer, showing nearby vendors on a map, and the matching layer, calculating distance and proximity to rank and filter results, which is the standard integration pattern for location-based marketplace apps - using the same maps SDK for both the visual and computational parts of "nearby" rather than maintaining separate geolocation logic. Payment integration followed the standard approach for Nepal-market apps: rather than building against international processors, the platform integrated directly with the eSewa and Khalti APIs, since these are the digital wallets Nepali consumers and small businesses already use for everyday transactions. This is the typical pattern for any consumer app targeting the Nepali market - local wallet integration is treated as a baseline requirement rather than an add-on. Multi-language support (Nepali/English) was implemented as an internationalization layer across the UI text and notification content, so language could be handled as a configuration concern rather than requiring separate app builds or duplicated screens per language - the standard approach for bilingual consumer apps built on React Native or Flutter, both of which have mature internationalization tooling.
The platform's core matching logic - surfacing the nearest mechanics, workshops, spare-parts suppliers, and roadside-assistance providers to a vehicle owner - was built on PostgreSQL's geospatial querying combined with the Google Maps API, letting the backend rank and filter vendors by proximity rather than pushing that computation to the client. This is the standard approach for location-based marketplace apps where "nearest available provider" is a core, frequently-run query rather than an occasional feature.
Arcetis built a reminder system tracking recurring vehicle-specific obligations - tax renewal, insurance renewal, and pollution (emissions) checks - and notifying owners ahead of each deadline. This required modeling vehicle records with per-obligation renewal dates in PostgreSQL and a scheduled job layer on the Node.js backend to generate and dispatch reminders, turning a manual, easy-to-forget compliance task into an automated notification tied directly to the owner's registered vehicle.
The consumer app lets vehicle owners compare pricing across multiple nearby mechanics, workshops, and spare-parts suppliers for a given service before choosing a provider, rather than surfacing a single result. This required a data model on the vendor side that supports structured, comparable pricing per service type per vendor, and a backend query layer that aggregates and ranks those prices alongside proximity data from the maps integration.
Rather than integrating a generic international payment processor, Arcetis built the payment flow directly against eSewa and Khalti - the two payment gateways standard for consumer and small-business transactions in Nepal. This is a deliberate technical decision specific to the Nepal market: building for locally-dominant digital wallets rather than card-based processors that are not the default choice for either vehicle owners or small vendors in this market.
Nepali/English support was implemented as an internationalization layer spanning the consumer app, vendor dashboard, and notification content, including maintenance reminders, rather than as a partial translation of a subset of screens. This let the same codebase serve both languages through configuration, avoiding the maintenance overhead of separate builds per language while keeping vendor and consumer experiences consistent across both.
Vendor categories connected
Languages supported
Technology used
Key learnings
This engagement is a useful example of what a regionally-specific marketplace MVP actually requires beyond generic app-building: the hard part wasn't assembling a mobile app and a backend, it was getting the market-specific details right on both sides of a two-sided marketplace. A Nepal automobile-service platform only works if it speaks Nepali and English natively, settles payments through eSewa and Khalti rather than card processors nobody locally uses by default, and gives non-technical vendors - mechanics, workshop owners, spare-parts sellers - a dashboard simple enough that they will actually use it to manage listings and respond to requests. Building the consumer side - search, compare, request, get reminded about tax, insurance, and pollution renewals - is only half the product; the vendor side has to be built with equal care or the marketplace has no supply to match demand against. It's also worth being direct about what this case study does and doesn't claim. The founder confirmed the MVP was built and delivered and is in use - that's a real, verifiable fact. No user counts, revenue figures, or growth metrics were tracked or shared, so none appear here. That's a deliberate choice: an honest scope-and-delivery description of a real, live MVP is more useful to a prospective client evaluating Arcetis than a plausible-sounding number that was never actually measured. What can be said with confidence is that the platform - mobile app, vendor dashboard, maps-based matching, local payments, bilingual support - was designed, built, and shipped as a working product.
Timeline depends on how many core flows are in scope. This engagement covered a consumer mobile app, a vendor/mechanic dashboard, maps-based location matching, a maintenance-reminder system, price comparison, local payment integration, and bilingual support - a full two-sided marketplace build rather than a single-feature app. Arcetis scopes MVP timelines around the number of user-facing flows and the number of third-party integrations, such as maps and payment gateways, required, since those integrations are typically the long pole rather than the UI.
For this engagement, Arcetis used a cross-platform mobile framework (React Native or Flutter) for the consumer app, Node.js for the backend API layer, PostgreSQL as the primary database, the Google Maps API for location-based matching, and Nepal-standard payment gateways (eSewa and Khalti) for transactions. The specific stack varies by project, but cross-platform mobile plus a REST API backend and a relational database is Arcetis's standard starting point for marketplace-style MVPs.
Arcetis integrates whichever payment gateways are actually standard in the target market rather than defaulting to international card processors - in this case, eSewa and Khalti, the two digital wallets used day to day by Nepali consumers and small businesses. Multi-language support is built as an internationalization layer across the interface and notification content rather than a partial translation, so it covers the whole product, consumer app and vendor dashboard alike, not just the main screens.
In this engagement, the vendor/mechanic dashboard let mechanics, workshops, and spare-parts suppliers list their business, set pricing and availability, and receive and respond to service requests from nearby vehicle owners. The goal of a vendor dashboard in a two-sided marketplace is to give supply-side users, who are often not technical, a tool simple enough that they will actually keep their listings current, since a marketplace's consumer-side value depends entirely on the supply side staying active.