Craigslist-style classifieds site for the USA Looknet
A Craigslist-style classifieds site for the USA that a team of 20+ people has built over more than five years: logo, prototype, design, front-end development, custom code, security, automated listing moderation, a mobile app and a commercial.
- Client
- Looknet Inc
- Industry
- Free classifieds board
- Location
- USA, 19,821 cities
- Timeline
- 5+ years, 20+ specialists
- What we did
- Logo, design, prototype, front end, back end, moderation, app, commercial
The result in one video
We shot the Looknet commercial with our own team: script, actors, costumes, five locations and voice-over. Press Play for 26 seconds on how people across the USA buy and sell on Looknet.
Looknet — Search, Buy, Sell · 2024 · 1080pHow we shot the commercial →
A Craigslist-style classifieds site for the USA, built from scratch — from the logo to our own code
Looknet is a free classifieds website for all of America: cars, real estate, jobs, services, electronics and a dozen more sections. For five years we ran the entire project: logo and brand identity, prototype, design, front-end development, a custom back end, security, automated listing moderation, a mobile app and a commercial.
- 01Listing wizardPhotos, category, a form for that category, price, city — a listing in a couple of minutes from a phone
- 02Automated moderationSix queued checks, from stop words to AI, so no one has to review every listing by hand
- 03Custom chatWebSockets, “typing…”, read receipts, message search, a block list and support in the same window
- 04MonetizationListing promotion, a Pro account and verified sellers — payments and identity checks via Stripe
- 05SEO across thousands of pagesState, city, make and model pages; the sitemap updates every day
- Front end
- Nuxt (Vue), server-side rendering
- Back end
- Laravel, MySQL, Redis, queues
- Real time
- WebSockets (Pusher), push notifications to the app
- Services
- Stripe, Twilio, Google Maps, OpenAI, Cloudflare
Sitemap
More than twenty page types and thousands of SEO pages built for search: states, cities, car makes. The user dashboard opens after sign-in; the admin panel is not shown here.
-
Home
/- Categories
- Latest listings by section
- VIP listings
- Blog and SEO copy
-
Catalog
/catalog- 20 sections → 163 subcategories
- Category filters: make → model → year → trim
- Price, radius in miles, Pro only
- Sorting, grid and list views
-
Listing
/product/…- Gallery and specs
- Seller, reviews, rating
- Chat, call, WhatsApp
- Map and similar listings
-
Locations
/states · /cities- 52 states
- 19,821 cities
- Category × state, category × city
- Used cars by city
-
Cars
/cars- Makes
- Models
- Landing pages for search queries
-
Pricing
/pricing- Listing promotion: Top, VIP, Daily Boost
- Pro account
- Verified sellers (Stripe Identity)
- Plan comparison
-
Help
/support- FAQ
- Contact
- Safe transactions
- Legal: terms, privacy, refunds
-
Sign in
/auth- Sign-up: Google, Apple, email, phone
- Verification code
- Password recovery
-
Dashboard
/announcements- My listings: active, under review, drafts
- Create a listing
- Chat: buying, selling, support
- Notifications
- Favorites
- Settings and block list
How a listing is created
On a classifieds board, what matters most is making things easy for the seller. The wizard guides them step by step, and the form adapts to the category: for a car, it builds the title from the make, model, year and trim on its own.
The seller starts by adding photos: they are compressed right in the browser, reordered by drag and drop, and the cover photo can be pinned. This step can be skipped.
Sections and subcategories appear as tiles with icons. If the seller starts with a title, the site suggests matching categories.
Each category has its own set of fields. For cars, it is a make → model → year → trim chain that builds the listing title automatically.
Price, “free”, trade or “contact for price”, plus an “OBO” checkbox. Links and phone numbers in the text are removed automatically.
The city is picked from 19,821 US localities, and a pin drops on the map. The address can be hidden, and the seller chooses how buyers get in touch: phone, chat or both.
The listing goes to automated moderation, and the seller is immediately offered promotion: Top, Daily Boost or both, paid via Stripe.
Automated listing moderation
Every new listing goes through six checks in a background queue. The expensive AI checks run only after all the others pass, which keeps the platform’s API costs down.
- 01Stop wordsA dictionary of banned words maintained by moderators
- 02Duplicate textCompared with the seller’s other listings: an 80% match or higher means rejection
- 03Similar photosPerceptual image hashing: the same photo can’t be reused across different listings
- 04Spam filterOur own Bayesian classifier; moderators retrain it with one click
- 05AI: textGPT checks the text against the platform’s rules
- 06AI: photosGPT reviews the photos for banned items, third-party contacts and junk
All clear → publishedThe listing appears in the catalog right away, with no wait for a moderator.
Violation found → rejectedThe moderator sees which check was triggered and why, and confirms or reverses the decision with one click.
If a paid listing is rejected, the money is refunded automatically. Before any checks run, links and phone numbers are stripped from the text, and sign-in and sign-up are protected by CAPTCHA, rate limits and SMS verification.
Custom chat
On a classifieds board, every deal starts with a conversation, so we wrote the chat from scratch with no off-the-shelf widget.
- 01Messages arrive instantly over WebSockets
- 02“Typing…”, read receipts, online status
- 03“Buying”, “Selling” and “Support” tabs
- 04Photos in chat, search, reports and blocking
- 05Push notifications in the mobile app
Looknet website screens
Mobile app for iOS and Android
The Looknet app mirrors the mobile version of the website and is published on the App Store and Google Play. We also designed the store listings.
View the app case study
Turnkey commercial video production
Script, casting, props, costumes, lighting, filming, editing and voice-over — how we shot the Looknet commercial.
Go behind the scenes
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