Case Study – Shop with points @ Amazon.com /other online POS merchants
Client Profile
- The client is a direct banking and payment services company with one of the most recognized brands in U.S. financial services.
Business Case
The customer wanted to offer its credit card members the ability to pay for purchases at Amazon.com and other merchants using rewards such as points, cashback or miles from banks or credit card issuers.
After completing an easy registration process, customers enrolled in eligible programs, could use rewards to shop online at Amazon.com/other merchants in the same way that they would use any other payment method.
BitWise Solution
BitWise team developed a Web Service that would be leveraged real-time by online POS merchants for various functions. This enabled customer to provide following real-time services:
- Registration – Enabled a card member to register their credit card at the Partner’s online website
- Balance Inquiry – Displayed the available reward balance that can be used to purchase items at the Partner’s website
- Reservation – Reserved a specified amount of Cash Back bonus / Miles for a particular order at the Partner’s website
- Reversal of Reservation – Reversed (cancelled) a previous reward reservation request of a previous partner reservation
- Health Check – Checked the availability of client systems that are involved in servicing requests from Partner
Key Features
- Design – The web-service enabled the customer to add any new subsequent boarding merchants seamlessly (with no changes to code). The Web service was hosted on the customer environment and served the requests over Internet. Each merchant was assigned unique URLs to point to the Web Service that would converge and translate to a single end point.
- Introduction of IBM Data Power – BitWise team worked on this SOA appliance that provided middleware connectivity and integration solutions. This was a key component used in implementing failover mechanism and timeouts which was required to achieve high availability of the system.
- Security – Since the newly developed web service had to be exposed to the internet, security was a big concern for financial, legislative and privacy reasons.An end-to-end security was implemented for the web service using below techniques:
- Secure Communications Channel – Messages between client and partner systems are exchanged through a cryptographically secure channel that meets industry, client and Amazon standards for secure communication.
- Mutual Authentication – Industry standard techniques were used for mutual authentication to verify the identity of message sender and receiver.
- HTTP Basic Authentication using LDAP (userid and password).
- For redundancy flips Partner calling the web service will follow the DNS published TTL which is 2 to 4 minutes
- Development Methodology – The web service was designed to consume other internal services which were also undergoing changes in parallel. This demanded an iterative development approach where an overall domain model was developed which was then divided into a comprehensive list of feature sets/functions. BitWise team coordinated and established a development plan that included the order in which feature sets will be realized.This approach helped in faster development by enabling to move to the next module while there was a waiting time for certain functionality to be completed by other team for the first module. This helped in designing, building, and testing features set faster and in a more efficient manner. Code review sessions planned after logical completion of each module also helped in continuous improvement during the development phase of this project. The findings from the first module review did not apply to second module and so on.
- Performance Tuning – Since the newly developed web service in-turn consumed other existing internal services, it was required to analyze the impact of the increased load (Transactions Per Second) on internal services and tune it to efficiently cater the increased transactions.BitWise team developed web service tuning scripts to load test the existing and the new web service. The tuning scripts were finally executed using the Load Runner (Load testing tool) in a controlled environment dedicated for applications tuning.Existing services and the new web service were successfully tuned with above considerations.
High Level System Architecture
Business Benefits
BitWise helped customer to partner with online POS merchants to provide greater customer engagement for the card members by providing additional opportunities to redeem their reward points.
BitWise provided 24 x 7 real time interface capability between Customer and Amazon and other merchants resulting into high Business gain.
- Monthly average Registrations per day : 5000
- Monthly average Order Submissions per day : 10000
