EcoCart
«Incredibly knowledgeable, friendly, prompt, and professional team. I was particularly impressed, from the very beginning, with their quality of work (both
Date
Dane Baker
Co-Founder and CEO
Incredibly knowledgeable, friendly, prompt, and professional team. I was particularly impressed, from the very beginning, with their quality of work (both specialized with Chrome Extensions, but also generally with our other products and web apps). They really know their stuff and I look forward to working with them again in the future
Thanks, Dane! The feeling is mutual — great project to be part of.
Cashback extension that helps offset carbon footprint caused by shopping
Mission
A San Francisco-based startup featured in Forbes, EcoCart aimed at bringing the idea of minimizing CO2 emission created by production and logistics of consumer goods to a practical level available to all e-commerce shoppers. Our goal was to build an app that would engage shoppers in helping plant trees or participate in other environmental charities with each purchase instead of holding on to cashback money.
Challenges
Users don’t want to plant trees themselves every time they receive a package so the app had to fully automate their participation in environmental charities. Besides users want to be sure their impact is meaningful and real because that’s the whole point of the app for them. The process had to be transparent enough to inspire trust and loyalty with users. Another challenge took the form of client’s requirement to allow the system support more than one affiliate network to be able to find the best deals and as many merchants as possible.
Solution & Value
We’ve developed a full stack solution for the browser extension including back end and an admin panel. To allow for multiple affiliate networks we initially designed the back end architecture to support such integrations. We started with one network and now we’re adding CJ (Commission Junction) because every affiliate marketer wants to work with them, right? :) CJ have a list of requirements so we built the app to match all their criteria, the app was easily approved by CJ. As a result the browser extension offers thousands of merchants and the more merchants there are the more opportunities users have for affiliate activation. Speaking of UX, making shopping ecologically sustainable is now effortless for the users. Offsetting CO2 inflicted by their consumerism is one click away which adds more satisfaction to the purchase To make the process transparent we built-in the app a calculator for CO2 generated by a user’s order specifically that will shortly be eliminated by a donation to the charity of user’s choosing. Of course the app notifies users of the CO2 amount generated by their order and EcoCart then offset with their help. This allows for credibility and elevates loyalty with users. After the launch of V1 we signed an SLA with the client and to this day we keep working on the app along with their new internal team. More improvements are coming along so the value list is to be continued.
