The Client
Development time
12 months
Team size
8 professionals
Refundmatic allows customers to get refund offers from third-party brands instead of getting a traditional refund. The platform coordinates and automates payments and shipping logistics for these transactions, which involve three key actors besides Refundmatic (the broker): customers, merchants, and marketers. Refund offers are often for products with a higher price than the original transaction value.

The Client

Private investor from the USA
Private investor from the USA

The Brief

Refundmatic’s CEO found an opportunity in an interesting niche that will benefit all participants in the refund process:
Merchants don’t lose a lot of money on refund transactions.
Marketers get new and returning customers for little investment.
Customers get products with prices up to 10% over the original transaction value.

The main idea

of the Refundmatic platform is to let users make refunds faster, cheaper, and easier.

The vision

of the project is to build a refund ecosystem for all e-commerce platforms available on the market and, as a result, to be the number one refund service in the world.

End Сustomers

cust1
Consumers who buy products on the Internet
cust2
Online stores
cust3
Marketers

Key Features

Profiles

allow merchants and marketers to create accounts where they can log in, give permissions to users to request a refund, and view transactions. Accounts are also where both merchants and marketers can add their brand assets, such as logos and copy.

Upload Offers & Calculate Offers

is the area where Refundmatic lets marketers provide promo codes. Refundmatic uploads codes on behalf of marketers. All that a marketer does is create unique codes in incremental amounts and send them to Refundmatic.

The Requests

service captures all transaction history and movement data in Refundmatic for each customer request and coordinates all data pulled from and pushed to Shopify, EasyPost, and Dwolla.

The Ship

service pulls in all customer shipping data and products from orders management and works with EasyPost to figure out shipping costs as well as to create shipping labels.

Approvals

is a service that allows merchants (and Refundmatic) to intervene manually and cancel or pause a customer request if a customer returns a product that is too damaged to warrant a refund.

The Payouts

service coordinates all payouts between parties and works using Dwolla’s APIs. Every merchant and marketer on Refundmatic needs to have a Dwolla account.

Dashboard Views

which use data from Requests, are meant to give each marketer and merchant a view of what events are occurring that pertain to them. Now we have very rough wireframes for the UI/UX components.

Team Performance

To develop this product, our team needed to deeply study Shopify in order to figure out all calculations, coupons, and the Shopify integration process. Creating the admin panel and calculations on the back end was a new experience for our developers. The team was small but productive.
Our client was very proactive. He was deeply involved in the project, maintained good relations with the entire team, and expressed gratitude for the outcomes.

Project management methodologies

SCRUM
sprint planning
two-week sprints
internal and external demo
weekly meetings with the team and client
backlog grooming
team retro

Technologies and Integrations

Technologies:
Frontend
Backend
Database
Framework
Cloud
Integrations:
  • Engine: Shopify
  • KYC: Middesk KYC
  • Payment processor: Dwolla, Shopify Billing API
  • Auth: Bearer Authentication JWT
  • Email: SendGrid
  • Post: EasyPost

Services

Project management

Business analysis

Solution architecture

UI/UX design

Shopify development

Frontend development

Backend development

Quality assurance

DevOps

Maintenance

Roadmap

2 weeks

Zero sprint

Deployment architecture, backlog for sprints 2–3, team setup and onboarding, DevOps activities, specification finalization, etc.
10 weeks

MVP

MVP with critical amount of features ready to be released and used by end custumers.
2-week iterations

Continuous development

Challenges

The main challenge for us was the Shopify approval process when submitting the project to Shopify stores. We had a vendor for this project who helped us with Shopify development.

Results

We created a simple minimum viable product (MVP) that is dynamic, hosted, secure, and can broker transactions between merchants and marketers to prove the business model and help our client get investment.
What are the benefits for buyers?
  • Select Refundmatic offers valued at up to 110% of the original purchase price
  • Get a free shipping label and return items to the merchant
  • Receive and use Refundmatic offers
How does it work?
If a purchased product does not suit the buyer, then instead of refunding the money, the seller can offer the buyer a coupon that allows them to receive any other product offered by merchant partners on the Refundmatic platform. Of course, the buyer has a choice — they can get their money back, or they can choose a product offered on Refundmatic.

We completed the project within the agreed deadline and budget. We are now awaiting a review from Shopify for our client’s platform to be released. At this point, the project is under maintenance.