SPARKFLY PERKS

Employee Perk Provider Brings Legacy System to the Modern Age

The Client

Sparkfly Perks was a corporate discount program provider, offering exclusive discounts and special offers for companies across the globe. Prior to the company’s acquisition by e-commerce provider EBG, Sparkfly Perks served over 30 enterprise-level clients by leveraging its travel, entertainment, and retail partnerships. In order to provide an employee-facing platform for each employer client, the Sparkfly Perks website included client-specific websites (“subsites”)  as subdomains under its primary domain.

The Problem

Because each Sparkfly Perks client needed its own custom-branded website for employees, the company’s developers had made a few modifications to  WordPress Multisite Core that created several problems. While their approach was well-intentioned, the developers bypassed best practices and standard operating procedures as they wrote their custom code. This nonstandard approach meant that many of the subsites’ features were buggy, inefficient, or otherwise impractical. 

One of the primary issues with the custom code had to do with the way offers and coupons were listed on each site. Ideally, offers that need to show on multiple subsites would use a permission-based system to verify which offers should be visible on which sites. The back end of the old Sparkfly Perks site created copies of each offer instead, duplicating the main site’s offer to display on each subsite. With over 3,000 offers active at any given time, this duplication model lent itself to overwhelming server costs, unexpected file deletion issues, and mistakes with offers showing on the wrong partner sites.

More importantly, the duplication meant that site updates took much longer than necessary. Importing one offer could take up to four days, threatening the nature of the company’s service model itself. Many of Sparkfly Perks’ partner organizations provide limited-time offers, outlining a specific timeline for each deal they provide. The four-day import timeline cut into that contracted timeline, making it impossible to upload new offers on short notice. As a result, employees may have received offers with ultra-short expiration dates and employers may have missed out on the full scope of their featured partnership.

The Results

The updated Sparkfly Perks site empowered the company to better serve its client base over the years, improving the experience for its retail partners, employer partners, and global employee network.

Once the duplicate offers were removed, all processes related to the site could be performed more quickly. For example, while creating a new subsite took several hours with the old setup, it could be completed in just 15 minutes with the new setup. This efficiency meant that all offers were visible in a timely manner and the program could continue to deliver results for employers and retail partners.