Challenge
Background DoubleTapp is a UK-based startup, founded in early 2018 in Sheffield, England. The service allows local businesses to promote on Instagram with the help of their guests: businesses give free stuff to those who post on Instagram tagging Business pages and adding location and hashtags. A popular example of this use-case. A Cafe offers free coffee to any Instagram user who makes a post mentioning this Cafe’s business page. The post needs to get 100 likes to qualify. As soon as it does, the user may visit the Cafe at any time and get his/her free coffee. Meanwhile the Cafe benefits from Instagram users visiting its page and more people getting to know about the Cafe. Task Fingers’ job was to design and develop the system which will make the experience of both Instagram users and Businesses smooth and as automated as possible.
Solution
The System The resulting system consists of 6 components and is integrated with 6 third-party services. Roadmap Working on DoubleTapp is a delightful experience started in April 2018 and rolling. You may find the major events of this history in the graphs below. The info is categorised according to mandatory parts of every project under Fingers management. Best practices Below you may find a couple of “places of interest” - the experience description that might be helpful for teams starting similar projects. We decided to go with the first one and till now are using the original Insta API to get the list of locations added to posts of Insta users - this functionality hasn’t been added to Graph API yet. Integration Decision Back in April 2018 we faced a tricky question - the need of integration with Instagram could be implemented in 2 ways: 1) to integrate with Instagram API, which looked like a tough decision as it had already been announced a subject to deprecation 2) to integrate with new Graph API with Instagram part in it that had been announced for release within months. User Story Flow After the MVP version was released and we switched to Agile development, we needed to sync Dev team’ vision with our client’s one. And nevertheless speed is the name of the game, we decided to make a step back & design a bit slower but far clearer 5-step User Story flow. Now Ashley has 3 touches in every User Story: initial request - to let us know what the business needs are; second - to approve our description of system adjustments upon this request; third - to approve the user story for development after the team provides high-level estimations.. This is the way to make sure that: a) what we are going to develop suits client’s needs; b) the client makes a fully-informed decision when approves the development. As you may have noticed this approach lies somewhere in between Waterfall and Agile, but it has proved its ground throughout the past couple of months. Facebook Graph API Integration As Facebook is moving Sign In API of all services under its management to the unified Graph API, here are challenges developers may consider beforehand: placement of development, staging and production environments on the same domain will let you imply 1 FB app. Otherwise you’ll need to make separate app for each environment, double efforts on requesting permissions and the worst part - to request permissions for production after release, which certainly isn’t the best practise; getting permissions applies for a fully functional service developed to make sure to sync well before release; most permissions call for additional documents signed by the Developer’s company: Supplemental Terms for Extended Platform Products, Technology Provider Amendment. Some permissions are not available for individual developers. This is better be performed beforehand. Stripe Payment System Integration When adding payment system to Business Portal there are a couple of nuances learned that are worth mentioning. First, please make sure that the payment system has got several payment methods available for use within countries of your interest. For example, in the UK BACS payment method is widely used by businesses to pay for services, that is why it’s highly recommended for SAAS working in the UK. Here is the link to study: An Introduction to The UK’s Interbank Payment Schemes. Here are a couple of payment systems that provide payment via BACS: Trustly allows to get payments from the following UK banks: Barclay, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, Metro Bank, Nationwide, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander, The Co-operative Bank, TSB, Ulster Bank. Gocardless.com Info on BACS Direct Credit, Direct Debit, Faster Payments, Chaps (bank 2 bank payment systems in UK); Guide to Direct Debit Cost: of BACS Via GoCardless: setup = £0; transaction costs = 1% capped at £2 (or 1-60p plus a **£200 monthly fee** for GoCardless Pro) More on plans SmartDebit Costy set up - £200; Don't look like a high-tech provider, more like an old-school fin company Still, the most popular method of payment is debit-card payment. 3D-secure is something developers need to pay attention to: working through all possible negative scenarios will be a challenge. Another point to keep an eye on is providing an informative experience to the end user: to make sure the user understands the stage of payment, the status of payment, the reason for payment rejection and an actionable plan to proceed. Here goes a diagram that shows data flow within Subscription function when payment is applied.
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