Project Background

World Three Zero was founded to help created a world of three zeros by 2050 - Zero Net Carbon, Zero Poverty, and Zero Regrets. To aid in this mission they came up with the 'Community Eco Bomb' - a bundle of 12 eco-products that benefit the environment, the local community, and the buyer's wallet.

Challenge

World Three Zero wished to provide a unique retail experience allowing customers who purchased the Community Eco Bomb to access a VIP store unavailable to the general public. This VIP store would allow for access to exclusive offers on refills & replacements on the 12 products available in the initial package.

This VIP store would be supported by a full range of E-commerce functionality such as a persistent shopping cart, credit card payment processing, and email alerts to track orders.

Key Requirements:
- Public-facing E-commerce portal with a private administration dashboard for site management
- Secure user account system with role-based access grants
- Configurable product listings with multiple variants and parameters
- Refer-a-friend system with discount codes offered to promote word-of-mouth referrals
- Full checkout & credit card processing services

Solution

Reaction Commerce was selected as the foundation of the World Three Zero platform. Reaction Commerce is an API-first commerce stack built using a service-based architecture. It provides a feature-rich API which can be integrated with a bespoke front-end to fulfil standard functionality such as product listings, shopping carts, checkout, etc.

Reaction is built using JavaScript for both the front and back-end systems. React is used for the web front-end with Node used for the server-side components. The API is provided as a GraphQL node with document storage and retrieval carried out using MongoDB. User accounts are provided by Meteor with OAuth 2.0 support driven by ORY/Hydra.

Reaction's codebase was forked and modified to add several bespoke enhancements such as the VIP store, refer-a-friend promotion, and Stripe payment processing integration. The platform was configured to run through a Continuous Integration / Deployment pipeline with all software builds embedded in and distributed as Docker images.

The World Three Zero platform is hosted in the cloud using Amazon Web Services. The environment is configured to adhere to PCI DSS requirements for processing credit card payments.