BetterVendors - Online Platform for Vendors

BetterVendors is an online marketplace connecting Australian event vendors with customers planning weddings, birthdays, corporate events, and general celebrations. The platform centralises vendor discovery and management in one unified experience. This was a side project developed and marketed by myself.

The Problem

Event planning involves coordinating multiple vendors - caterers, photographers, venues, entertainers - each with their own separate websites, booking systems, and communication channels. Customers struggle to compare options, track conversations, and manage multiple vendor relationships efficiently. Meanwhile, vendors find it difficult to reach new customers beyond their existing networks.

The Solution

BetterVendors creates a centralized hub where customers can discover, compare, and communicate with multiple Australian event vendors through a single platform. Vendors gain access to a broader customer base while customers can streamline their event planning process with unified vendor management, comparison tools, and integrated communication.

Technical Implementation

Architecture & Stack Built as a modern full-stack application using Next.js for both frontend and backend, leveraging its API routes for a unified development experience while maintaining excellent performance and SEO capabilities.

Authentication & User Management NextAuth.js handles user authentication, supporting multiple provider options and secure session management for both vendor and customer account types with role-based access controls.

Database & ORM Prisma serves as the database toolkit, providing type-safe database access and automated migrations. The schema handles complex relationships between users, vendors, events, bookings, and communications while maintaining data integrity. This is then synced with a Postgres database, provided by Supabase.

API Layer tRPC creates end-to-end type safety between frontend and backend, eliminating API contract mismatches and providing excellent developer experience with auto-completion and compile-time error checking throughout the application.

Frontend Experience Tailwind CSS enables rapid UI development with consistent design patterns across vendor profiles, event planning interfaces, and customer dashboards. Benefits of the Tech Stack

The Next.js/Prisma/tRPC combination provided exceptional developer velocity with full-stack type safety, while NextAuth.js simplified the complex authentication requirements for a two-sided marketplace. This stack choice enabled rapid iteration on marketplace features while maintaining code quality and reliability.