Modernizing a premium e-card platform
Digital media · Subscriptions — We delivered a major platform version: a decoupled Next.js customer experience and a Laravel-backed API for catalog, billing, fulfillment, and operations — multi-gateway payments, rich media, homepage merchandising, and queue-backed email and notifications.
Client & context
- Industry: Digital media and consumer subscriptions
- Product: A long-running premium brand for hand-painted and animated digital greetings (personal and corporate), delivered as a modern web platform with membership, catalog, and fulfillment.
- Engagement: Full-stack product engineering and platform modernization — new customer experience, versioned API, admin and operations tooling, and integrations.
Public copy avoids client naming until approved; metrics, quotes, and screenshots require sign-off.
The challenge
The product spans a large catalog, free and premium experiences, subscriptions and one-off purchases, rich media (animation, video, imagery), and reliable delivery — send, reschedule, pickup, and replies. The business needed:
- A modern web frontend that could scale with marketing and product iterations.
- A stable API for authentication, commerce, and the full card lifecycle.
- Operational tooling for staff to manage cards, templates, pricing, content, and support workflows.
- Integrations with major payment providers and media pipelines without over-coupling to a single vendor story.
Our approach
We treated the system as two products: the member-facing app (discovery, personalization, checkout, “my cards,” address book) and the admin and operations layer (catalog, templates, orders, users, CMS-style pages, newsletters, and dynamic homepage content).
The customer app is a Next.js application with Redux for predictable state, consuming a versioned REST API on Laravel. Sensitive flows use token-based auth suited to SPA and API separation, with CORS configured for a clean split between web origin and API. Long-running work — email, notifications, and similar paths — uses queued jobs with Redis and queue monitoring so interactive requests stay responsive.
Commercially, the platform supports multiple payment gateways (including webhook handling) for real-world buyer preferences and redundancy. A dedicated media pipeline serves responsive imagery and video surfaces; geo-awareness is available where the product requires it.
What we shipped
For end users
- Browse and discover greetings by category, popularity, search, and curated homepage content (including dynamic stories and featured items).
- Account lifecycle: registration, verification, login, password reset, profile and billing touchpoints.
- Favorites, address book with groups and import paths, and flows to compose, draft, autosave, send, and resend.
- Recipient experience: secure pickup flows, replies, and notifications tied to email delivery.
- Subscriptions and pricing on dedicated flows, aligned with premium versus free catalog rules.
- Trust and compliance: cookie consent, policy pages driven from the API, and contact flows.
For the business and admin
- Full catalog management: categories, individual cards, sorting, templates, drafts, and cache controls.
- Order and payment oversight, subscription types, and user administration (including credential and history-style tooling).
- Marketing and content: newsletter subscriptions, contact messages, safeguards such as blocklists, pricing lists, and CMS-style pages.
- Homepage merchandising: dynamic video, featured card slots, and editorial story content.
Platform engineering
- REST API organized by domain (auth, account, product, extras, dynamic content, mailing, contact).
- Webhooks for payment and partner mail events.
- Custom mail integration for the client's delivery pipeline.
- Queue-backed mail and notifications for reliability under load.
Outcomes & value
Add measurable results only after client approval (conversion, performance, deployment cadence, support trends). Without private numbers, the honest headline is capability and risk reduction:
- Clear separation between public app and API, improving deployability and parallel work across teams.
- End-to-end card lifecycle from catalog to recipient pickup, including drafts and resends.
- Multi-provider payments and webhook-driven reconciliation patterns.
- Operations-ready admin so the client team can run the business without engineering for every catalog or content change.
Modernizing commerce
or media-heavy product?
Catalog, payments, admin tooling, and delivery — we can help you ship a decoupled frontend and API without stalling the business.