AI-Enabled Custom Materials Marketplace

Project Title: Custom Tiles & Building Materials Marketplace with AI Image Search Project Overview We are looking for an experienced development team to design and build a modern, scalable website for tiles, flooring, wall panels and other interior materials. The website should offer a browsing and product-discovery experience similar in functionality and quality to: * https://www.florzy.com/ * https://materialdepot.com/ * https://mytyles.com/ These websites are references for functionality and user experience only. The final website must have an original design, branding and codebase. A key feature will be AI-powered visual search, allowing customers to upload an image and discover visually similar products from our catalogue. Core Requirements 1. Customer-facing website * Modern, premium and mobile-responsive design * Fast loading and SEO-friendly architecture * Homepage with banners, featured categories, collections and products * Product catalogue with multiple categories and subcategories * Product listing and product detail pages * Search with autocomplete and suggested products * Product filters such as: * Category * Material * Colour * Finish * Pattern * Size * Application * Room * Price range * Brand * Sorting by popularity, price, newest and relevance * Wishlist and recently viewed products * Product comparison * Related and visually similar products * Customer login and profile * Product enquiry and quotation request * WhatsApp enquiry integration * Store locator and Google Maps integration * Blog, inspiration gallery and SEO landing pages * Contact and appointment-booking forms * Social media integration 2. Product detail pages Each product page should support: * Multiple high-resolution product images * Zoom functionality * Product videos where available * Product name, SKU and brand * Price or “Request Price” option * Available sizes and variants * Colour, finish and material details * Technical specifications * Recommended applications * Stock or availability status * Downloadable catalogue or specification sheet * Request sample * Request quotation * WhatsApp enquiry * Similar products * Recently viewed products * SEO-friendly URL, title and metadata * Product schema markup 3. AI Image Search Customers should be able to: * Upload an image from a phone or computer * Take a photo using the mobile camera * Crop the relevant area before searching * Find visually similar tiles or materials * View similarity-ranked results * Refine the AI results using category, colour, material, finish, size and price filters * Search using room photographs, screenshots, reference designs or individual product images * Receive alternative recommendations when no exact match is found Expected technical approach: * Image embeddings generated using a suitable computer-vision model * Vector similarity search using a vector database or equivalent technology * Product images indexed automatically when products are uploaded * Results should combine visual similarity with product attributes * Admin should be able to re-index products and review search quality * The system should be designed to improve as the catalogue grows Please mention which AI model, vector database and search architecture you recommend. We are open to solutions such as OpenAI/CLIP-compatible embeddings, Google Vision, AWS, Pinecone, Qdrant, Weaviate, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch or another suitable stack. 4. Admin panel/CMS The admin dashboard should allow our team to: * Add and edit products without coding * Bulk import products through CSV or Excel * Upload multiple product images * Manage categories, subcategories, brands and collections * Manage product attributes and filter options * Manage prices, sizes, variants and stock * Manage banners and homepage sections * Create pages, blog posts and inspiration articles * Manage SEO titles, descriptions, URLs and schema * View and respond to enquiries and quotation requests * Manage customers and appointments * Export leads and enquiries * View AI image-search activity and popular searches * Manage users, roles and permissions * Configure WhatsApp, email and analytics integrations 5. E-commerce readiness The initial version may focus on product discovery, enquiries, sample requests and quotations. However, the architecture must be ready to support: * Shopping cart and checkout * Online payments * Delivery charges * Coupon codes * Tax/GST invoices * Order tracking * Returns and refunds * Razorpay or another Indian payment gateway Please quote e-commerce checkout as either part of the main proposal or as a clearly priced optional module. 6. SEO and marketing requirements * Server-side rendering or static generation * Clean, editable URLs * Technical SEO setup * XML sitemap and robots.txt * Canonical tags * Product, breadcrumb, article, local-business and FAQ schema * Editable titles and meta descriptions * Image alt-text management * Automated image compression and WebP/AVIF delivery * Fast Core Web Vitals * Google Analytics 4 * Google Tag Manager * Google Ads conversion tracking * Meta Pixel * Search Console setup * Event tracking for enquiries, WhatsApp clicks, calls, sample requests, quotation requests and appointments * SEO landing-page templates for locations, product types and applications 7. Preferred technology We prefer a scalable custom architecture such as: * Next.js/React frontend * Headless CMS or custom admin panel * Node.js, Python/Django or another suitable backend * PostgreSQL or another suitable database * Cloud-based image storage and CDN * Vector database for AI image search * AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Cloudflare or Vercel deployment We are open to alternative technologies if the developer can explain their advantages. A standard WordPress template with multiple plugins will not be preferred unless the applicant can demonstrate that it will meet the performance, scalability and AI-search requirements. 8. Security and performance * Secure authentication and role-based