xpate clients now receive payouts in minutes and can send transfers from their accounts

E-commerce sellers often wait for days to receive purchase earnings, which need to travel from the sales platform to the bank or a digital account.

xpate believed it can reach a breakthrough that would minimize the payout time for their clients. How? By implementing a merchant’s account with money transfer functionality. That required setting up new cloud architecture for that project.

On paper, all sellers who use xpate’s paygates for their e-stores (or other service) could access and use their earnings immediately after purchase.

xpate decided to collaborate with The Software House, recognized by clients for its AWS expertise, to help the company double the delivery speed.

The Software House filled the talent and knowledge gap in just one month to help xpate design the system and cloud architecture and create a new platform for payment collection and outbound transfers.

A Cloud Architect, 7 Developers, a DevOps Engineer, a QA Engineer, and a Project Manager handled the project fully while reporting to xpate’s CTO.

Together, we build the MVP of the platform 4 months, allowing xpate to take it live by the end of March 2023.

Technology choice

Next.js + React (frontend), Serverless framework + Node.js (backend), AWS, GitHub Actions, IcePanel, Datadog, Figma

What xpate achieved

The Software House delivered several integrations that included the gateway, the ledger. the omnichannel client communication platform and the signing platform among others.

Our team also provided the custom software to support the platform with the business logic that enabled the USP of xpate, and delivered a secure client portal for e-commerce merchants.

After a month of cloud engineering workshops, our architect and xpate’s CTO designed the backend infrastructure based on the Serverless framework, which would process each transaction from the merchant’s store.

Serverless allowed xpate to limit operational costs thanks to its pay-for-use model and enables its engineers to implement dozens of valuable integrations.

The frontend used the UI designed by xpate to present new money-processing functions to the seller:

• Viewing recent transactions and account balance,
• Choosing a beneficiary,
• Transferring money,
• Refunding the sale,
• Downloading account statement,
• Sharing referral link,
• Exchanging currencies between GBP and EUR.

The logic

1. A seller registers for an account,

2. The gateway creates the account and provides credentials,

3. The Serverless framework listens if there are new purchases for the seller’s store,

4. A new purchase appears within their account,

5. The ledger service registers a change and transfers the earnings within minutes.

Since the solution also depended on a variety of third party tools, we needed to make sure that they continue to work properly and than when they stop doing so – we get timely alerts. And that’s just one of many objectives the observability system was meant to serve.

Protecting third party integrations with observability 

As part of our work on the infrastructure, we’ve been tasked with completing a number of observability-related objectives:

• monitoring the state of both the core app and third party integrations as well as quickly finding errors by analyzing app behavior,
• app performance analysis,
• gathering insights for future improvements.

To achieve these objectives on the frontend, we used the Sentry app monitoring system. Other relevant tools included:

• AWS CloudWatch – for collecting logs, metrics, and event data in real-time,
• AWS X-Ray – collecting and analyzing interactions between components,
• Datadog – enhancing capabilities of the other tools through comprehensive visualisations, monitoring, and alerting.

Speaking of Amazon Web Services, let’s take a closer look at how we made sure to use their potential to the fullest.

AWS Lambda

A compute service that runs code on Amazon’s infrastructure and provides automatic resource management to free engineers from server management. Used for backend operations and business logic.

Amazon SQS

Self-contained service for message transferring between app components without restrictions on volume. Used for asynchronous communication.

Amazon DynamoDB

NoSQL database with performance counted in milliseconds that’s guaranteed by AWS.

AWS KMS

A centralized cryptographic service that offers access control, data signing and encryption, and policy management in one place.

Amazon S3

Stored documents used by the product and data backups as a reliable and easy-to-manage and configure service.

AWS SecretManager

A separate service that manages sensitive credentials.

Amazon WAF

Anti-exploit and security management service that centralizes policy management.

AWS App Runner

Container management service used for the client portal that doesn’t require pre-existing architecture.

Around 100 customers will test the feature in Q4 of 2023. Meanwhile, xpate expands the platform to introduce new features to their UK merchants, while preparing for its roll-out for Europe.