The Challenge
Better That Connect serves charities, community groups, and cause driven organisations across Australia. These are organisations that have spent years building genuine community trust but struggle to convert that trust into sustainable commercial revenue. The fundraising landscape they operate in is genuinely broken in several ways, and most existing options force them to compromise on either control, brand, or returns.
The specific pain points run deep:
Fundraising events demand months of planning and depend entirely on physical attendance, which creates a ceiling on what any single campaign can raise
Online donation pages ask supporters to give without offering anything tangible in return, which limits how often the same person will contribute
Branded merchandise programs require upfront inventory investment and warehousing that most cause driven organisations simply cannot justify
Affiliate partnerships hand control over to third parties, meaning the organisation loses ownership of the customer experience and the data that comes with it
Building a proper commerce platform from scratch requires a development team, payment processing relationships, logistics partnerships, and supplier sourcing that sit completely outside what a charity is built to do
Sourcing product is its own bottleneck because recruiting retailers, negotiating terms, and onboarding suppliers can take longer than the campaign itself
Most off the shelf platforms force every partner into a generic marketplace experience where the organisation's brand becomes a footnote rather than the main event
The real gap was the absence of a model where an organisation could run a fully branded commerce experience under its own identity without having to build or operate any of the underlying machinery.
The specific pain points run deep:
Fundraising events demand months of planning and depend entirely on physical attendance, which creates a ceiling on what any single campaign can raise
Online donation pages ask supporters to give without offering anything tangible in return, which limits how often the same person will contribute
Branded merchandise programs require upfront inventory investment and warehousing that most cause driven organisations simply cannot justify
Affiliate partnerships hand control over to third parties, meaning the organisation loses ownership of the customer experience and the data that comes with it
Building a proper commerce platform from scratch requires a development team, payment processing relationships, logistics partnerships, and supplier sourcing that sit completely outside what a charity is built to do
Sourcing product is its own bottleneck because recruiting retailers, negotiating terms, and onboarding suppliers can take longer than the campaign itself
Most off the shelf platforms force every partner into a generic marketplace experience where the organisation's brand becomes a footnote rather than the main event
The real gap was the absence of a model where an organisation could run a fully branded commerce experience under its own identity without having to build or operate any of the underlying machinery.
Our Solution
We built Better That Connect as a multi tenant commerce platform designed around a partnership model where each channel partner gets a fully branded storefront on their own dedicated subdomain. The architectural decision driving everything else was strict tenant isolation. Every API call resolves the correct partner context through request routing, and customer accounts, order histories, and community data stay scoped entirely to that partner. Nothing bleeds across tenants, which was non negotiable for organisations whose entire value proposition rests on community trust.
The backend runs on Node.js with Express, backed by MongoDB. This pairing was chosen because the platform needed to handle high concurrency across multiple storefronts simultaneously, and the document model fits the variable shape of partner configurations, retailer catalogues, and order metadata far better than a rigid relational schema would have. Real time state is managed through Socket.io, which pushes live updates, order confirmations, and active participant counts to connected clients without forcing page refreshes. A separate worker process runs in parallel to handle scheduled jobs like stock resyncs, notification dispatch, shipping status updates, and file management, which keeps the main application responsive under load.
Payments run through Stripe, with Stripe Connect handling direct payouts to retailers. The contribution layer that routes a percentage of every sale to the partner organisation is processed natively as part of the order flow rather than reconciled afterward, which removes manual accounting work from the partner side entirely. Retailers connect their existing Shopify or WooCommerce stores directly to the platform, so product catalogues, pricing, and inventory sync automatically, and orders placed through any partner storefront push back into the retailer's existing system. This was a deliberate choice to avoid asking retailers to manage a second inventory, which would have killed adoption.
Shipping integrates with Australia Post, StarTrack, and Sendle, with postcode based rate calculation and label generation handled inside the platform. Transactional email runs through SendGrid. File storage sits on AWS. The whole application is containerised with Docker and split into a web tier and a worker tier so it scales horizontally as partner and user volumes grow. Sentry handles error monitoring so the operations team catches issues before end users see them.
Authentication supports local credentials, JWT for API access, and OAuth through Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Every user gets associated with their channel partner context at registration, and that association carries through every subsequent interaction, which is what makes the tenant isolation model actually work in practice rather than just on paper.
The backend runs on Node.js with Express, backed by MongoDB. This pairing was chosen because the platform needed to handle high concurrency across multiple storefronts simultaneously, and the document model fits the variable shape of partner configurations, retailer catalogues, and order metadata far better than a rigid relational schema would have. Real time state is managed through Socket.io, which pushes live updates, order confirmations, and active participant counts to connected clients without forcing page refreshes. A separate worker process runs in parallel to handle scheduled jobs like stock resyncs, notification dispatch, shipping status updates, and file management, which keeps the main application responsive under load.
Payments run through Stripe, with Stripe Connect handling direct payouts to retailers. The contribution layer that routes a percentage of every sale to the partner organisation is processed natively as part of the order flow rather than reconciled afterward, which removes manual accounting work from the partner side entirely. Retailers connect their existing Shopify or WooCommerce stores directly to the platform, so product catalogues, pricing, and inventory sync automatically, and orders placed through any partner storefront push back into the retailer's existing system. This was a deliberate choice to avoid asking retailers to manage a second inventory, which would have killed adoption.
Shipping integrates with Australia Post, StarTrack, and Sendle, with postcode based rate calculation and label generation handled inside the platform. Transactional email runs through SendGrid. File storage sits on AWS. The whole application is containerised with Docker and split into a web tier and a worker tier so it scales horizontally as partner and user volumes grow. Sentry handles error monitoring so the operations team catches issues before end users see them.
Authentication supports local credentials, JWT for API access, and OAuth through Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Every user gets associated with their channel partner context at registration, and that association carries through every subsequent interaction, which is what makes the tenant isolation model actually work in practice rather than just on paper.
Results & Impact
*Channel partners launch live, fully branded storefronts on dedicated subdomains without building any backend, payment, or logistics infrastructure themselves
*Retailers extend existing Shopify and WooCommerce inventory into partner channels with automatic sync, removing the supplier sourcing bottleneck for new partners
*Every sale routes a contribution to the partner organisation natively through the order pipeline, eliminating manual reconciliation
*Strict tenant isolation at the database and request routing layer keeps each partner's community, data, and brand identity fully their own
*The containerised architecture with separate web and worker tiers scales horizontally as new partners and retailers come onto the platform
*Retailers extend existing Shopify and WooCommerce inventory into partner channels with automatic sync, removing the supplier sourcing bottleneck for new partners
*Every sale routes a contribution to the partner organisation natively through the order pipeline, eliminating manual reconciliation
*Strict tenant isolation at the database and request routing layer keeps each partner's community, data, and brand identity fully their own
*The containerised architecture with separate web and worker tiers scales horizontally as new partners and retailers come onto the platform
