Walmart company logo

Saving the operations cost and scaling the product with a custom web app for the Ad Tech company

Chances are you know retailers like Walmart, The Home Depot, CVS Pharmacy, and other large chains in the USA and Canada. You may have seen their weekly ads, deals, and coupons in your Facebook timeline or as Google Ads banners on different websites. The journey from a non-interactive PDF with deals and coupons to that engaging banners has a direct connection to the custom web app we built for the large retail Ad Tech company.

The Challenge

The outdated web app wasn’t a big priority for our client. However, once he had given it to us on maintenance and light reengineering we made a few improvements. It started to support more Facebook ad types, also Pinterest was added and performance got better. Mattew, the co-founder, decided that it’s a promising niche, and it worth building the new app.

Outcomes

With complete support from the client, 7 blackbirders, and 9 months later we successfully implemented the client’s vision into superior ad tech product. Everything from the new UX design, web application architecture planning to final implementation and current DevOps was and is on us.

Impact

Was built an entirely new internal operations web app that has improved the operations time by almost 60%, increased accuracy of the curation and supports scale to most of the Facebook, Google and Pinterest ads types. It also helped to reduce the estimated headcount required to support posts the planned campaigns. The web app is already in use. More retailers have been onboarded with smaller operations resources.

“You've saved our business! It fits our needs perfectly. It really saves us time and effort. Blackbird is exactly what our business has been lacking. Needless to say we are extremely satisfied with the results.“

Matthew C., Co-founder
About the client201-500 employeesHQ Toronto, CanadaClient since 2018 | Retail Tech and Online AdvertisingFunded Startup previously, SMBs currently
Industry and verticalsRetail & E-commerceMulti-carrier retailers

Technical summary

In the early beginning of our cooperation with the client, Blackbird worked on multiple microservices where we used Docker and Kubernetees for deployment. The communication between the microservices was done via RabbitMQ.

Built the first version of the new 1:1 Retail Conversations™ utilizing AWS Amplify framework. (as a part of theResearchandAnalyticsservices used).

Migrated architecture from entirely microservice-based application architecture to CQRS with event sourcing. UtilizedAxonFramework to support the new application infrastructure.

Senior developers mastered and successfully applied Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) architectural pattern with event sourcing within two calendar months.

OvercameTwilio APIlimitations of 1000 threads per account alongside learned how to reassigning each of threads to sales reps under multiple accounts.

Improved DNC handling both auto and manual ones.

Developed the new brand, legal and privacy Compliance API for all of Statflo products.

Moved from own SSO authentication solution toAuth0 API.

Implemented the new responsive UI design on the front end withReact,Typescript,Redux Thunk,Redux Toolkit. Apollo Client was used since all communication is powered by theApollo Graphql.

Quality control:all endpoints are covered with end-to-end automation tests in Postman

Deployed and operated DevOps infrastructure for the product to run a closed beta with the most interested in product clients.

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