Overview:

Giftlove is a marketplace where local businesses can create and sell digital gift cards, cash and gifts to customers.  Giftlove also allows for visitors to donate directly to a restaurant rather than buying a digital gift. Giftlove is an all-in-one gift card system. Users can buy a gift from a business, hold it, and redeem it at the time of their choosing all through the giftlove platform. Local businesses can easily sign up and begin selling digital gifts and accepting donations same day.

Giftlove is a marketplace where local businesses can create and sell digital gift cards, cash and gifts to customers.  Giftlove also allows for visitors to donate directly to a restaurant rather than buying a digital gift. Giftlove is an all-in-one gift card system. Users can buy a gift from a business, hold it, and redeem it at the time of their choosing all through the giftlove platform. Local businesses can easily sign up and begin selling digital gifts and accepting donations same day.

Roles:

Problem

COVID-19 brought many hardships, one of which was lockdowns. Lockdowns drastically reduced capacity and even after lockdowns ended people were still avoiding going out. Local businesses were in crisis mode. Many restaurants in Dallas were setting up GoFundMe’s on Facebook to ask their customers to donate in order to keep them afloat. Tech-savvy businesses were spinning up gift card programs so that customers could provide advanced cash flow.

The problem was that there was not an easy way for local businesses to create gift cards or to accept donations. A GoFundMe on Facebook might reach a hundred people, and many businesses did not want to go the donation route. An all-in-one gift card creation and redemption system was not available for these businesses that did not already have digital gift cards. (Companies like Toast and Square would soon create their own online stores for clients similar to GiftLove)

COVID-19 caused lockdowns, which put local restaurants and businesses at risk of going out of business.

Solution

We created a marketplace where local businesses could easily create an account and sell gift cards and take donations all from one place. This was a better solution than GoFundMe’s and other gift card options for a few reasons. First, having a donation button on the same page as the gift card sales page would increase the likelihood of a customer donating and buying a gift card.

Second, having a marketplace where local businesses were all located together would create more exposure to customers, allowing more potential purchases than if a customer had to go to a business-specific website in order to make a purchase. So we made a turnkey gift card and donation marketplace that allowed businesses to easily sell custom gift cards and take donations, and which allowed customers to easily buy gift cards and redeem at a future time with using nothing more than their email address.

We created a marketplace where local businesses could easily create an account and sell gift cards and take donations all from one place.

What We Did

Our goal was to build the marketplace and backend in under 2 weeks. We used Bubble, a light code software builder with an integrated backend. I was able to release Giftlove within 2 weeks, building the brand, marketplace and business dashboard completely from scratch in that time. Through the Giftlove creation process I learned how to structure databases and how to integrate that database into the logic workflow of a marketplace.

In under 2 weeks, we designed the Giftlove brand and used a software builder called Bubble to build the marketplace frontend and backend.

Redemption

The gift card redemption workflow had to be built to work with any local business no matter what POS system they were using, whether they were able to scan barcodes, etc. Each gift card was assigned a code on creation that could be “activated” and remain active for 15 minutes. Once a code was activated and expired, that code would be removed from the database of gift cards and added to the “used” gift cards database. This allowed any local business to use Giftlove no matter the POS and allowed any customer with a smart phone to easily hold and redeem their gift cards on their phone.

Our redemption system allowed for any business, regardless of their POS, to redeem our gift cards and allowed customers to redeem our gift cards using nothing more than their email address.

Limitations

I did not spend much time fixing design bugs that arose if they did not affect the performance of the marketplace. At the time, Bubble had some flaws design-wise (that have since gotten better). I made sure though that all parts of the design that were integral to Giftlove’s usability (e.g. responsiveness) worked fine and had no issues.

Due to the nature of Bubble and the time restrictions, design took a backseat to functionality.

Brand Design

Giftlove

Giftlove

Marketplace

Our built-from-scratch e-commerce platform allowed customers to use a credit card to purchase a custom gift card from a local business. Each purchase was assigned a unique code in our database that allowed us to track sales for local businesses, track total sales, expire these gift cards once used, and more. Building and structuring the database for the backend system that connected the marketplace purchases to the businesses was a tremendous learning experience for me. Here is the purchasing process in action (you can also go to the website and go through the process yourself):

Dashboard

On the backend, I built the dashboard for businesses to connect their bank accounts through Stripe, see sales numbers and add and edit custom gift cards. This dashboard was connected to the same backend in Bubble where the customers' purchases were held.

Conclusion

Building a marketplace on Bubble was a great learning experience that involved learning multiple new skills and also building a brand as quickly as possible. The end result was something that we were proud of, even though we never actually used the platform.