The Engineering Behind Coded Coupons from buzai232's blog

eBay’s coded coupons tool is one of the newest products available for sellers to drive buyers to come back and purchase more items from their store. The tool allows more flexibility and control in offering discounts to prospective buyers, both on and off our marketplace. To get more news about couponfeature,Read More

With this new feature, sellers can create their own, custom discount codes that can be shared publicly on ebay.com or privately through their own marketing channels. Sellers can also print their coded coupons to include in shipped packages, helping to drive repeat purchases from their customers. Since the release of coded coupons in April, over one million buyers have made purchases on eBay using coded coupons.

This tool was developed by creating a new user experience stack using eBay’s latest technology stack — Raptor and MarkoJS. Here’s what we learned through the development of the tool’s system architecture and integrations, and how we overcame technical challenges along the way.
Through the Seller Hub Marketing tab, sellers can manage different types of shopping deals, including price markdowns, order discounts, volume pricing and shipping discounts. These deals are shown on buyer placements such as search results and the View Item, Cart and Checkout pages, and helps drive more purchases and large cart sizes. These capabilities allow sellers to give discounts for large purchases to buyers to support our thriving marketplace.

Sellers can choose the discount type they’d like to offer: a cash discount, a percentage discount or a bundled percentage discount on multiple items. They can also easily set variables, including how much in total they’d like to spend on their promotions campaign, who can see the coupon codes, how long the promotion will run and eligible items.

The marketing tab serves both sellers and buyers on eBay’s marketplace, and faces a unique challenge of scale: Sellers deal with a “promotion” entity, while buyers view and interact with an “item” entity. To scale horizontally for both cases, the platform has a dual-write system using both Oracle and MongoDB as the source of data.

Oracle’s Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) helps sellers create and manage promotions with varying degrees of inventory and scheduling selection. Meanwhile, the MongoDB cluster helps scale the billions of views, rendering the discount information in strategic placements across buyers’ search and transactional journey.

To provide the flexible infrastructure necessary for eBay’s dynamic new couponing, the coded coupons feature was built on a brand new user experience stack using the latest design standards and the most recent eBay skin release. The eBay skin leverages eBay’s design system to create a unique look for the eBay brand and standardize common elements, such as headings, paragraphs, fieldsets, images and links. The eBay components are created and utilized as reusable marko-js components to provide a consistent user experience.