In a world where finding gift cards for small, locally owned businesses can be difficult, Gift Card Market has made it easy with its innovative, patent-pending technology.
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Gift Card Market is a pioneering digital gift card platform that simplifies the process of sending gift cards to friends and family for over 5 million favorite local restaurants, spas, and salons. In a world where finding gift cards for small, locally owned businesses can be difficult, Gift Card Market has made it easy with its innovative, patent-pending technology.
Users can discover local favorites through a simple search interface and enjoy streamlined sending options via text to a known contact or email, backed by advanced fraud protection. Based in Kansas City and Fort Myers, Gift Card Market brings over 20 years of experience in gift card innovation.
OPPORTUNITY: Simplifying Local Gifting with Scalable Innovation
Gift Card Market set out to create a platform that would make it simple for consumers to purchase and send digital gift cards for their favorite local businesses, while providing a secure and intuitive user experience.
To achieve this, Gift Card Market needed to build a proprietary, scalable platform from scratch—one that could dynamically curate gift card options, incorporate fraud protection, and comply with industry regulations. Additionally, the solution needed to integrate seamlessly with payment processors, card program managers, and other critical systems, while laying the groundwork for API integration to enable partners to embed Gift Card Market’s local gifting options into their platforms.
“Consumers have always wanted to text a gift card to their favorite, local business. Now they can find all of them in one location. 27Global is our technology partner, working closely together to bring this major industry innovation to market that is intuitive and built for the future.”
Brett Glass Co-Founder, Gift Card Market
The Solution: Dynamic Local Gifting with Gift Card Market
As one of only ~60 AWS SaaS Competency partners globally, 27Global was the ideal development partner for Gift Card Market to develop a secure and scalable platform that revolutionizes local gifting. The primary focus was to create a flexible and robust system that dynamically curates and delivers local gift card options, has strong fraud prevention measures, complies with regulatory requirements, and supports future growth through API integrations.
27Global brought together an expert team of cloud engineers, software developers, and consultants to design and build a greenfield platform that met Gift Card Market’s requirements. Working closely with Gift Card Market’s founders, 27Global delivered a scalable platform tailored to the unique needs of local gifting while ensuring compliance with industry regulations and standards.
Key Features
Dynamic Gift Card Curation
A proprietary, patent pending curation engine integrates with business data search engines, enabling users to browse millions of local establishments and instantly generate gift cards for their selected businesses. This personalizes the gifting experience and supports local businesses.
Mobile-First Design
Built with Next.js, the web app ensures users have a seamless experience on mobile devices while supporting desktop usability. The application also enables users to send gift cards from their own text message app, within an existing conversation thread, creating a more personal and meaningful experience. It also includes integrations with Apple Wallet and Google Wallet for a seamless payment experience.
Secure Payments and PCI Compliance
Gift Card Market integrates with Stripe and Fiserv to provide robust, secure payment processing, providing redundancy and operational flexibility for transactions. By leveraging the front-end SDKs available for these processors, Gift Card Market significantly reduces its PCI compliance burden, as no sensitive payment data is stored or transmitted directly by the platform.
Fraud Prevention
Multi-layered fraud protections were implemented to safeguard against fraudulent activities. Key measures include:
Implementation of AWS WAF and Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise to mitigate automated attacks and malicious traffic.
Limitations on gift card purchases, including caps on cards bought by a single user and those sent to the same recipient email or phone number.
Real-time alerting and programmatic responses based on key metrics such as card creation velocity, chargebacks, and other site activity patterns.
Integration with Stripe Radar and Fiserv Ravelin, leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms for real-time fraud detection at the point of payment.
One-time password (OTP) authentication required for recipients to redeem and view gift cards.
Merchant Category Code (MCC) restrictions to ensure gift cards are only used within their intended categories.
Modular Architecture for Third-Party Integration
The backend services powering the platform were designed with a minimally-coupled microservice architecture, ensuring flexibility and adaptability for future use cases. This design allows the platform to expose APIs that enable third-party integrations, such as white-label solutions or offering local gifting options through external applications. By decoupling the storefront from the backend services, Gift Card Market is well-positioned to capitalize on new business opportunities and form strategic partnerships.
RESULTS: Successful Launch and Momentum for Future Growth
The partnership between Gift Card Market and 27Global led to the successful launch of a groundbreaking local gifting platform, empowering consumers to send personalized gift cards to over 5 million local restaurants, spas, and salons. The platform’s forward-thinking architecture also paved the way for a strategic partnership with gift card industry leaders. One example was announced in this press release.
The launch of this platform required proficiency in AWS services, including Fargate for Amazon ECS to containerize workloads, VPC for network isolation, RDS for database management, and Elasticache for efficient data caching, among others, to ensure a scalable, secure, and high-performing infrastructure. In addition to leveraging these foundational cloud technologies, the 27Global team evaluated and integrated multiple external services, such as Twilio and SendGrid for communications, Stripe and Fiserv for payment processing, business data search engines, and analytics tools like Hotjar and Google Analytics to optimize the user experience. Terraform was used to streamline infrastructure provisioning and ensure consistent and efficient deployment processes.
The success of this launch has established a strong foundation for Gift Card Market’s future growth. The flexible architecture enables the platform to scale seamlessly, integrate with third-party systems, and adapt to evolving business opportunities. With its foundation of advanced cloud technologies and scalable architecture, Gift Card Market is now poised to expand its reach, pursue new integrations, and continue driving innovation in the local gifting industry.
“Brett and Nicole Glass are true innovators and have realized a game-changing, patent pending gifting platform that connects consumers with over 5 million local businesses. Under the covers is an efficient, flexible, enterprise-grade system delivered through 27Global’s technical expertise and deep partnership with AWS.”
John Marney, a visionary director at 27Global, boasts a rich tapestry of experience in steering businesses towards digital excellence. With a keen eye for innovative solutions, John has played a pivotal role in leveraging cutting-edge technologies to empower clients in their digital transformation journey. His passion for bridging the gap between business objectives and technological advancements continues to drive 27Global’s commitment to delivering unparalleled software and cloud solutions.
