Money Box
A cashback and discount platform for Australian shoppers. More than 1400 stores in one place, deals searchable by category, region and price, gift cards, and earnings that go through to a bank account.
Overview
Money Box lets people shop with the retailers they already use and get money back for it. The idea is affiliate marketing turned into something a shopper actually wants: one place to find the deals, and real cash rather than points.
Money Box Global, an Australian cashback and discount service, came to Sphinx Solutions to build the web and mobile applications that platform runs on.
They ran a market analysis before choosing anybody, and what they wanted was specific: applications that were secure, straightforward to use, and able to grow as the store list did.
With 16 years of engineering behind us, our team worked through their business objectives and technical specifications first, went through the platform options with them, then settled the technology and wireframed the build rather than starting from a specification and building blind.
The plan was approved, and it became the iOS, Android and web applications the service runs on.
Money Box wanted an application that brought genuine cashback from a lot of different retailers into one place, and made the shopping experience better rather than merely cheaper.
The design had to stay minimal and still sell the offer. No flashy colours, no animation, no confusing banners, and elegant at the same time.
That is harder than it sounds on a site whose whole content is discounts. Our UI/UX designers worked through it with them and revised to what they asked for.
There were two interfaces to build, not one. The customer side had to show every deal from every retailer at a glance and stay simple doing it. The admin side had to let somebody add deals from as many stores as they liked, and add or remove the featured cashback offers, without the page falling over as the list grew.
Building all of it from ideation rather than from an existing product was the other part of the job. There was no system to extend, only a description of what the service should feel like.
We delivered the web and mobile applications, and the admin behind them.
What it added up to for the client was a discount service with no membership fee, covering most of the large retailers in Australia.
Sphinx Solutions delivered the iOS, Android and web applications behind Money Box: searchable deals across more than 1400 stores, gift cards, social sharing, cashback tracking and payout, and an admin panel built to keep adding retailers.
“Sphinx Solutions has helped us establish ourselves as a smart shopping platform. They have helped us in developing and deploying user-friendly, secure, and scalable applications.”
Tech stack
What people usually ask about Money Box and about building something like it.
In roughly this order: work out who it is for and what the market actually wants, plan the design and wireframe it, decide how the cashback itself is tracked and paid, build the front end and the back end around that, and then keep supporting it. The cashback mechanics are the part worth settling first, because everything else is shaped by them.
A site or app that pays a member back part of what they spend with an affiliated retailer. It sits between the shopper and the merchant: the platform partners with merchants, the shopper browses and clicks through an affiliate link, buys as normal, and the commission that comes back is shared with them as cashback.
It is a large and growing part of affiliate marketing, and it moves with eCommerce and with how people shop rather than on its own. We would rather point you at a current figure from a named source than quote one at you, so ask and we will send the research we are working from.
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