A custom competition platform, built to replace a stack of rented plugins
A previous developer had stalled the project, and the off-the-shelf route meant renting plugins forever. We built the whole platform instead.
What they came to us with
A previous developer had left the project stalled, and the off-the-shelf route meant paying recurring plugin fees indefinitely for something that still would not do what the business needed.
The problem, in business terms
Comp Performance sells entries into competitions, so the website is not a shopfront for the business, it is the business. Every entry, every draw and every payment runs through it.
They came to us having already been through a developer who did not get the project off the ground. The alternative was assembling it from WordPress plugins, which meant paying rent on the site for the rest of its life and still ending up with something that could not quite do what a competition operator needs: allocate tickets, run a reward scheme, and get a certificate to a winner.
What we built
A custom platform, written from scratch rather than configured.
For the customer
- Accounts with secure credential storage, editable details and full order history.
- Entries allocated a ticket at random within each competition's range.
- A reward-points scheme that earns on spend and redeems against coupons and free tickets.
- Stripe checkout, with Apple Pay and Google Pay added as the project went on to widen the ways people could pay.
For the people running it
- An admin panel to create and amend competitions and categories, and to control which are highlighted.
- Winner certificate printing, straight out of the system.
- Coupons, rewards and promotional messaging managed in one place.
- Role-based access, so more than one person can administer it safely.
It is built in React and Go and hosted on Amazon Web Services, load balanced with round-the-clock monitoring. That was a deliberate call rather than a default one: a competition with a closing date cannot afford to be down, and the traffic arrives in spikes rather than evenly.
The result
A complete competition platform the business owns outright. Entries, payments, rewards and fulfilment run through one system, the admin side is handled by the client rather than by us, and there is no annual plugin bill attached to any of it.
Built with
“Great service and got our unique raffle project off the ground taking over from a poor developer.”
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