Work link: A Web-Based Service Marketplace with Automated Booking Management

DOI

https://www.doi.org/10.59256/ijire.20260706005

Published In

Volume 7, Issue 6 (2026)

Published Online

November-December 2026

Pages

44-52

Article Type

Original Article

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WorkLink is a web-based service marketplace that connects service seekers with independent service providers through one centralized application. Informal ways of finding local professionals make it hard to compare service category, experience, location, hourly rate, availability and customer feedback. The proposed system brings these activities into a single workflow: user authentication, provider profile management, service- and city-based discovery, availability display, scheduled booking requests, provider responses, notifications, completion and reviews. It is implemented with Node.js and Express (server and REST API), HTML, CSS and browser-side JavaScript (interface) and SQLite (persistent storage). JSON Web Tokens support authenticated sessions, passwords are protected with bcrypt hashing, and a node-cron task applies configured warning and automatic-rejection rules to unanswered pending bookings. Functional testing covered 16 scenarios across registration, authentication, provider management, filtering, booking transitions, scheduled rejection, notifications, completion, reviews, data retrieval and analytics, and all 16 passed. These are functional outcomes, not production-scale performance measurements. The work demonstrates a lightweight architecture for the basic local-service transaction lifecycle; production deployment would require payment integration, real-time communication, stronger provider verification, security hardening and scalable data infrastructure.