E-commerce Affiliate Gifting SaaS Platform Based on People's Preferences
A B2B2C SaaS tool for organizing and tracking your gift-giving calendar. Allows e-commerce businesses to expose their products and make them available for gifting. It helps people to manage events and simplifies gift searching and buying. With the algorithm based on people's preferences, this becomes a new way of communicating gift choices between the giver and receiver.
Developed using:
Jenkins Kubernetes Docker
The task
Our task was to create a mobile application for a company to simplify the process of choosing gifts for US and Canadian users. Android and iOS apps had to manage both personal events and public holidays. The idea is quite simple: You find yourself in an online store via the app, where you can buy any gift for someone. The system had to track the user's preferences and suggest to other people which gift they may like. The recipient reviews and ranks in a gamified way what his friends will buy for him without revealing who buys what.
The challenge
Our product designer and analyst spent a lot of time struggling to make the whole process simple, gamified, communicative, and at the same time private. Gift-giving had to stay a surprising process, but we had to gather information about preferences and interests. It had to be simple for people and very intelligent inside. It was all about balancing things that were hard to combine. No one needed an application that would ask you tons of questions to understand what you really like.
MVP development
As in any startup, we are faced with a strict budget limitation. Our customers came with a lot of ideas, most of which required a lot of time to implement. The MVP plan we built aimed to implement only the most valuable features that pushed this solution to the market. We analyzed all requirements and ideas, also brought our own ideas and vision, and then cut the whole requirement list to only 30% of its original size.
Bringing the SaaS model
While the 1st version was based on Rakuten PopShops, a conceptual shift was bringing a SaaS model that gave companies the ability to expose their products into a huge database of items and sell them using our system. This was too risky and expensive in the beginning, so we implemented this model in the 2d phase and turned this system into a B2B2C platform connecting companies and people into one clever market.
Marketing Research
Since we had to create an online shopping app with all UI/UX from scratch, we studied many similar solutions in the market before we started planning and designing. We checked all of the features created by others and then came up with new ones that no one else had. Thus was born the Gift Box, where you can find all the items shoppers consider for a potential gift recipient for their specific event. Still, the gift recipient doesn’t know who the shoppers are - a viral feature that engages people in the gamification process.
Design
We were not given any mockups, and the project was fully designed by Ardas. Our creative team was happy to get such an opportunity to prove ourselves, so we enthusiastically undertook it. Our team worked on all the tiny details to ensure the application met the modern trends and Google Material Design requirements. The customer had only to approve the final result.
Recommendation system
One of the main features is that we show recommendations (items) based on the user preferences for the specific event, thus, directing them on what to buy - it simplifies the searching process for a gift and increases the likelihood of success.
Respect the interests
We collect and store information about the preferences and interests of people associated with certain holidays.
Buying preferences
We accumulate information about the interests of people based on the assumptions and preferences of online box shop customers.
Audience rating
Those preferences are scored based on the gift recipient’s responses from the Gift Box. As a result, the buyer can see what the most desirable gift is.
Gift Box
As has been already mentioned above, this feature is an entirely new communication method, which was created due to the deep process of marketing research. So what is it all about?
Surge of emotions
A potential gift recipient is able to review his/her gift box and express the emotion (rating) in relation to the gift.
Feedback
The communication process goes rapidly in instant messaging without traditional text messages.
The plot thickens
The gift recipient does not see who bought the gift. That means we help the buyer stay incognito and make a surprise.
Pop shops Integration
PopShops is the engine behind thousands of shopping implementations and is used by more banks, airlines, and affiliate malls than any other online shop marketing engine. This is the fastest way to get millions of products from different online stores and networks.
Shopping API and Feeds
We use the PopShops API for the convenient search of any type of category and product.
Product Caching
We cache all the items to minimize the number of requests to the PopShops since it is on a paid basis.
Other features
Facebook Login
User profile and settings
Event management
Android (Google) calendar integration
See upcoming and past events
Store user’s mobile contact list on the server
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Ryzhokhin