Wafferli

Kuwait had no single bilingual place where people and businesses could post and find local listings. Wafferli covers five different kinds at once: products for sale, services on offer, upcoming events, places worth visiting, and time limited deals. In the same app someone can browse a phone for sale, book a plumber, find a concert this weekend, discover a new restaurant, and claim a half price offer.

A visitor lands on a homepage with a rotating banner, category tabs, a flash deals slider that moves every few seconds, and rows for events, places and products. They search or filter by city, neighbourhood, category, price and rating, with suggestions appearing as they type across all five listing types. On a listing they see the photos, the seller, the location, and reviews from other people, and they can save it to a wishlist, leave their own review, like someone else's, or message the seller directly.

Deals are the reason people come back. When someone claims one they get a unique nine digit code, shown as a scannable square the shop can read at the counter, and they earn loyalty points. Those points build up through four tiers, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Diamond, all visible on a wallet page alongside every deal they have ever claimed. Flash deals expire on their own exactly 24 hours after being posted. There is also a referral code, and using someone's code when you sign up credits them 100 points.

Anyone can become a seller, either as an individual or as a business. A business gets a name, description, logo, photo gallery, website and social links. An individual just gives a city and neighbourhood. From there they post any of the five listing types through one form, reuse their profile location rather than retyping it each time, manage everything they have posted from one place, and pay to promote a listing higher up the results.

Buyers and sellers talk in a real time chat that carries a lot more than text. Photos travel through the chat connection itself, which keeps the whole exchange on one channel. There are location pins for arranging where to meet, replies attached to a specific message, and a card for the listing being discussed that opens the ad in one tap. It shows who is online, when someone is typing, and when a message was delivered and read.

When a seller posts something new, a notification service looks up which city and neighbourhood they are in, finds other people in the same area, and sends them an alert about it, delivered instantly if they are online and stored for later if they are not. That is what makes a listing nearby feel local rather than lost somewhere in a nationwide feed.

The most interesting decision architecturally is that all five listing types live in one database collection rather than five. They extend a single base model using Mongoose discriminators, so each type keeps its own fields, its own validation and its own queries, while the shared parts, favourites, reviews and ratings, are written once. Questions that span the whole platform, admin totals or a search across every type, then run as one query instead of five.

The bilingual side goes further than swapping the words. Switching to Arabic mirrors the entire interface: the direction is set at the root, row layouts reverse, text moves to the right, and the navigation flips with it. The Arabic message file ended up about 27 percent larger than the English one, which is what genuine full coverage looks like rather than a partial translation.

The admin panel is a separate application of 14 pages covering users and sellers, moderation for each of the five listing types, a blog and questions editor, a tool for sending email campaigns to newsletter subscribers, and staff accounts with permissions set page by page. I built it using the Next.js for front end, the Node and Express back end with its real time layer, and the Admin Panel in React.js.