Case Study
Goods RU Cashback Service
Goods RU Cashback Service is a marketplace for Russian customers – built on a Backendless backend – that offers cash rebates from major retailers across virtually all product categories.
Cashback Marketplace For Russian Customers
Goods RU Cashback Service provides Russian shoppers with access to retailers from across the world that offer rebates and discounts on their products. The app is available on the Google Play Store and as a web app.
- Deals
- User Transactions
- Discounts
Backendless: Tell us about Goods RU Cashback Service. What is its purpose? What problem is it seeking to solve?
Mansur Mukhametulin, Founder of Goods RU Cashback Service: Cashback returns part of the money spent on the purchase of a product or service. Contrary to popular belief, cashback does not increase the retail price of a product – in fact, the cashback service negotiates a deferred discount with online stores and services, and pays most of this amount to customers. Online stores pay cashback amounts after the expiration of the period established by law for the return or exchange of the purchase. On average, stores pay cashback within 20-50 days after purchase.
Our advantages:
• Increased cashback and convenient purchase statistics
• Popular stores and services with high cashback
• Large selection of categories and easy search
• Stores are grouped for convenience in categories
Goods RU Cashback Service helps Russian customers of online stores and online services to get back a portion of the money spent on purchases and thus save. For owners of online stores and online services, the Goods RU Cashback Service is an additional sales channel, helping to form a loyal audience of regular customers.
How does your app utilize Backendless?
We’re using the Backendless platform to implement the backend of the cashback service. When developing, we were faced with the task of developing a backend for several applications in the shortest possible time:
1. Web application for the administrator of the cashback service (Angular app – managing the database of partner stores, statistics, financial transactions of partners and customers)
2. Web application for clients of the cashback service (Angular PWA app – catalog of partner stores, statistics, client’s personal account)
3. An Android mobile application for cashback service clients (a hybrid mobile application on the Ionic framework – a catalog of partner stores, statistics, a client’s personal account).
We chose Backendless on the basis that it allowed me to quickly build all the backend components on a single platform. In Backendless, we have implemented:
• A system for managing cashback service users using the Users API
• API for managing partner stores catalog using Codeless Business Logic
• API for managing user statistics using Codeless Business Logic
• API for providing store catalog to users using Codeless Business Logic
• Auto-renewal of authorization tokens using Codeless Timers
• Client applications use Backendless JS SDK for data access / authorization
Development took 2 weeks, including planning the system architecture and writing client web applications.
What is your development background? Do you have experience coding? Have you built any applications previously?
I am a full-stack developer. I’ve been developing hybrid (Ionic Angular, Cordova, HTML5 / JS) mobile apps since 2016. During this time, I have developed 73 mobile applications. Until 2016, I was irregularly engaged in the development of high-load web applications in PHP + Nginx.
Goods RU Cashback Service is my first complex project (backend + admin web app + user web app + user mobile app), completed completely independently in record time.
Which Backendless features play the largest role in your app’s functionality?
The Goods RU Cashback Service application uses Backendless to store data, provide access to data, organize a user management system. In the near future I plan to use messaging to work with push notifications.
The most important features that Backendless provides for the application are:
• Most importantly, the convenience of organizing a user management system,
• High speed of data access, and
• Flexibility of the system, which allows you to very quickly implement or change the business logic of the application by using the capabilities of the visual constructor Codeless.
How has your experience been with Backendless?
I think Backendless is an excellent platform that provides almost all the requirements for developing modern applications.
I was especially pleased with the ease of use of Codeless for developing business logic – using the visual designer, anyone can develop a rather complex function or API, and at the same time get excellent speed and stability.
Were there any other options you considered, such as other low-code/no-code platforms or building with code?
We considered Google Firebase and Amazon Lambda as an alternative, but based on a set of criteria, I preferred development on the Backendless platform.
We didn’t consider development “in code” from the very beginning; the development and further support of the full stack of required technologies and development environments requires an order of magnitude more resources.