ABOUT GROUPON
Groupon (www.groupon.com) (NASDAQ: GRPN) is an experiences marketplace where consumers discover fun things to do and local businesses thrive. For our customers, this means giving them an amazing selection of experiences at great values. For our merchants, this means making it easy for them to partner with Groupon and reach millions of consumers around the world. To find out more about Groupon, please visit press.groupon.com.
THE CHALLENGE:
Booking is a highly fragmented space that varies by merchant type––making it important for a marketplace like Groupon to ensure that their platform is compatible with leading solutions. Since the booking space has so many different providers that serve the company’s merchant population, Groupon had to do custom builds for each one––resulting in time-consuming and costly integrations. As a result, the company set out to build a self-service API that enables third-party booking and inventory providers to integrate directly with the Groupon platform.
How It Was Solved
Groupon Connect™ is the company’s recently launched next-generation API that enables leading booking, reservation and ticketing platforms to connect merchants directly to the Groupon platform, making it even more convenient for consumers to book deals from their favorite local businesses and attractions.
Sphere’s technical resources supported Groupon’s IT team in helping to build its Connect solution.
Technically speaking, it was built in 3 stages:
- Migration of key staff members to a new application that utilizes Groupon’s internal services for much better performance and maintenance.
- Optimization of the project’s structure, removing bottlenecks
- Implementation of a common pattern for the development cycle. The modern version of the Booking Tool was built using mainly React, Typescript and Styled Component.
The Results
By accelerating 3rd-party partner integrations with the new self-service API tool, booking providers can join the marketplace up to 50% faster. The new system significantly improved the user experience by decreasing loading time.
From a technical standpoint, the main benefit was the implementation of the proper pattern for the development cycle and implementing new features while going through the migration to the newer application.
“Providing a seamless and simple way for third-parties to connect directly to Groupon enables us to quickly increase the amount of high-quality, bookable inventory in our marketplace and unlock new opportunities for merchants by giving them the tools they need to attract new customers and manage their businesses in one place. Sphere’s consultants served as an extension of our own dedicated Engineering teams and helped us build and deliver Groupon Connect in record time.”
Victor Paulsamy
Director, Booking and 3PIP
Groupon
