Client Description
The company provides an eCommerce solution for collective shopping. They enable their customers to get more affordable prices on services and products by shopping in bulk. They provide their partners with additional channels for selling goods or services.
Client Background
The company relies heavily on its extensive network of affiliates, partners, and aggregators. This network allows for the best price in any given vector. Their agile business model adapts to shifting markets, keeping a competitive edge.
Business Challenge
The company quickly outgrew the capabilities of its ready-made affiliate tracking solution, which was initially used to jump start their business. CodeCoda was approached to implement a bespoke solution. Base specifications of the system were:
- be able to handle high amounts of web traffic,
- be able to scale seamlessly to varying loads,
- provide various channels and formats for banner creation,
- provide insights into advertisement campaigns,
- suggest ways automatically to optimize the affiliates' campaigns,
- be deployable on-site,
- handle commissions and payouts in a secure and transparent way.
Project Details
Client's goals
The current solution that the company had in place was cumbersome to use, unable to scale and was vulnerable to failure. CodeCoda researched the current platforms on which the company relied the most, assessing the best possible integration solutions with them. CodeCoda dove right into the company's "heart", figuring out how to integrate with the company's own custom CRM. This was to enable transparent payouts to the affiliates. During the planning phase, CodeCoda took steps to understand the issues that the company's partners were struggling with. CodeCoda created a mockup, which was used to iterate over ideas quickly, providing the best solution for their needs.
Development Challenges
During initial tests of the system, Codecoda's development team realized that their ad campaigns rarely changed after they started. A bottleneck of the system would be serving the banners. To mitigate this, the architecture had an emphasis on optimizing database I/O, by employing multiple layers of intelligent caching mechanisms and batching ad effectiveness pingbacks. Another feature was the ease with which we can make new banner formats. The Ad Creator Studio module that we created removed the need for an actual developer. When onboarding a new partner, everything could be achieved using a beautiful UI, from a phone or tablet.
Value delivered by CodeCoda
CodeCoda delivered immense value to the company, providing a complete solution that integrated flawlessly with both their CRM and the company's partners' platforms. In essence, the solution diversified the affiliate partners and allowed for a self-serving solution. This solution works transparently by providing deep insight into every ad campaign. The panels and affiliate-facing UIs were easy to use and available from mobile devices. The end-cost of maintaining such an extensive affiliate network was cut down by 68% - not including the server cost price reductions. The engineers at CodeCoda provided the company with proactive support throughout the process, working on both the back-end and front-end modules of the product.