GreaterGood.com

Scalable application architecture, robust logging framework for 1:1 marketing

GreaterGood.com is the Internet's most popular online affiliate shopping site. GreaterGood allows users to shop at over eighty best-of-breed online merchants, such as Amazon.com, while donating a percentage of the purchase price to the non-profit, school, or university of their choice. GreaterGood also hosts thehungersite.com and thebreastcancersite.com, which are some of the most trafficked sites on the Internet.

Challenge

The company's increasingly escalating traffic and transactions demanded a significantly upgraded application architecture without risking valuable uptime. GreaterGood also asked Übermind to transition thehungersite.com from a simple cgi-bin website to a WebObjects-based application (highest-trafficked in the world). Additionally, GreaterGood requested detailed user behavior data, such as purchase data and click-through paths per user, in order to drive dynamic promotion campaigns and other 1:1 marketing initiatives.

GreaterGood deals with the intersection of three distinct business entities: Users, Merchants, and Partners (i.e., non-profits, schools, and universities). All of the GreaterGood applications had to scale to millions of users, 80+ select merchants and roughly six hundred thousand partners - thousands of which needed their own GreaterGood-enabled custom shopping village. Each application had to maintain sub-second response times. This was especially important for www.thehungersite.com, which had well over a million hits per day and peak loads exceeding 15 clicks per second.

Solution

Übermind re-implemented the GreaterGood business object model from scratch using a Party-Role architecture, which simplified the source code and database schema, and allowed the applications to deal with all business entities using a common API. GreaterGood's main application was ported to this architecture while adding new features, such as dynamically updateable content, Akamai support, and a new promotion system. In addition, most front-end content was made configurable via a single BackOffice application. At the same time, the Übermind team built an advanced cross-store product search engine, a patent-pending utility that won the prestigious 3COM Year 2000 Retail Network Innovation Award.

Übermind then re-implemented thehungersite.com using the above mentioned business object model and logging framework, which allows GreaterGood to share valuable data across applications. The architecture also supports dynamic content, allowing rapid re-branding of the same application for other causes such as therainforest.com and thebreastcancersite.com.

Finally, Übermind implemented a robust logging framework that captured detailed client information such as purchase history, time of entry, click-through paths, IP address, and more. The data warehouse, together with the web-enabled reporting engine above it, lets marketing staff segment site visitors across many dimensions. It also serves as the internal financials back-end system and is designed to drive 1:1 marketing/promotion campaigns.

By the end of the engagement, Übermind left the client with a stable, high performance, easy-to-use application suite, which today allows a much smaller team to manage the sites' performance, behavior, and content.

Results

  • Award-winning product search utility
  • Highly scalable architecture
  • Increased customer information
  • New marketing opportunities
  • Technical support cost savings