Introducing A Better Way To Turn Loose Change Into Cash Without The Tedious Process
About Coinstar
Coinstar has existed since 1991 and operates with a unique business plan. In short the business offers a quick way for customers to turn over their pocket money and get cash in hand via more than 20,000 stores. With customers and stores in multiple countries and more than one billion transactions, the company has achieved high levels of success already.
Organizing data between such a large number of stores and locations requires a robust system. The app was also required to differentiate between locations, regions and countries. Furthermore, customized content for each individual user was requested as well, to enable users to browse locally based on their default location.
How We Solved The Challenge
To help ensure a stable backend system, we first changed the functionality of the API to have a fixed limit on requests. Then to ensure better quality of the search results we limited the amount of location based results to ensure the users were shown the most appropriate data.
Our developers at The Blue Creative successfully implemented the proposed changes to the platform, which in turn led to Coinstar being able to better manage the location based results for the customers using their app.
The app lets users create personal accounts that can be customized to help the users keep track of and manage every single transaction.
With the added social aspects of the app, users can share their experience with friends and family directly on the platform.
Coinstar is also a business that cares about the community. That is why the app offers users a charity feature, allowing part of the exchanged amount to be donated to reputable organizations.
The business currently operates in 8 different countries: the UK, Ireland, Canada, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Spain, and Coinstar has plans to add more countries to that list over time.
To help ensure a stable backend system, we first changed the functionality of the API to have a fixed limit on requests. Then to ensure better quality of the search results we limited the amount of location based results to ensure the users were shown the most appropriate data.
Our programmers also created a custom solution for handling third-party library support for iOS and Android maps, something that normally is not an option in React Native. While it was difficult, we still managed to deliver.
To be more specific, the code responsible for showing maps on iOS devices did not also work on Android based units. Another issue we solved was the slow loading time of the more than 20,000 locations of the stores connected to Coinbase.
We managed to bridge the gap between the third party libraries, and ended up with a compact solution for the maps that worked on both Android and iOS.
