WeGift Connect

Client

The Voucher Market (trading name WeGift) were a startup that had a number of projects, all based around financial transactions involving voucher codes.

Background

The WeGift Connect project centred around creating a single point of purchase for gift cards from a large repertoire of popular businesses.

Many online and physical stores offer voucher codes that their customers can pre-purchase, and then use later to pay for goods. Each store either generates the unique codes themselves or uses an external company to generate the codes, and each of these companies has a different process that you need to go through to sign up with them and then to generate the codes. This means that if you want to be able to buy voucher codes from many different stores you will need to integrate separately with each of their systems.

The main concept of the new platform would be to create a single interface to all of the different voucher code providers. Customers would need to be able to either order voucher codes through an online user interface, or order them programmatically using an API.

Solution

There are three core components to the system that we implemented: the accounting system, the order processing system and the invoicing system.

Accounting System

This project involved a lot of financial transactions as The Voucher Market would be buying voucher codes from a range of different providers and selling them on to their customers, and along the way there would be lots of different transactions and fees. We advised The Voucher Market that the best way to record these transactions would be to implement a robust and reliable double entry book-keeping system.

Order Processing System

A fundamental part of the platform is the ability to process orders and to retrieve the voucher codes from all of the integrated providers. We devised a highly customised order processing system that could asynchronously process large quantities of orders, retrieve the requested voucher codes and store them in a consistent format, ready to be passed on to the end user. This system was accessible by The Voucher Market's customers through an online interface as well as a fully featured API that their customers' own systems could integrate with.

Invoicing System

Due to the complex and varied nature of The Voucher Market’s customer base, we needed to build a highly customised invoicing system. It was important that our solution could handle all of the combinations of business relationships, billing models, tax requirements and multi-currency transactions.

Here our decision to use a proper accounting model paid dividends as we had an accurate and detailed set of accounting data that could be used to generate the invoices.

Results

We delivered a reliable and scalable system that enabled The Voucher Market to begin processing orders for their customers, and then to continue on their journey to becoming market leaders in their industry.

After completing the initial project we have continued to work with The Voucher Market alongside their in-house development team to add enhancements and features to the platform.