Better That

The Challenge

Better That set out to build something that didn't exist off the shelf: a single marketplace that could pull live product catalogues from hundreds of independent retailers — each on a different e-commerce platform — into one master database, then sell those products through a novel reverse auction (or "drop auction") model where prices fall over time until a shopper decides to buy.

That ambition created hard technical problems:

• Fragmented data — retailers run on Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce and Neto, each with a different API, data shape, and webhook model. All of it had to be normalised into one real-time master catalogue.
• Scale — millions of SKUs, continuously syncing stock and price changes, without stale listings or overselling.
• A pricing engine that behaves like a salesperson — increments and decrements had to respond to supply, demand, and buyer behaviour, not just tick down on a timer.
• A product-approval bottleneck — over a million products sat waiting for manual review, an impossible amount of human work.

The Solution

We built Better That as a set of specialised Node.js microservices around a shared MongoDB master catalogue — separating the auction engine, the public API, the product importer/approval system, background services, and the admin portal so each could scale independently. The result is a platform that continuously ingests catalogues from every major e-commerce system, runs them through automated approval, and sells them through a real-time bidding engine with fully integrated payments and shipping.

Feature Highlights

1. Reverse-Auction ("Drop Auction") Engine

The heart of the platform. Instead of bidding a price up, Better That drops a product's price over time, and shoppers "buy now" whenever the price hits a number they like. A dynamic pricing algorithm — conceived as a "virtual salesperson" — generates personalised increment/decrement values driven by supply, demand, and buyer behaviour. Bidding and price movements are pushed to shoppers in real time over Socket.io (a dedicated auctionSocket service).

2. Master Product Database & Multi-Platform Aggregation

A unified catalogue that integrates individual retailer stores and keeps them current in real time via webhooks. Connectors normalise products, pricing, inventory, and images from Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce and Neto into one scalable database — the foundation that lets one marketplace present products from 350+ retailers and 9M+ SKUs as a single storefront.

3. Auto-Approval System (approval at scale)

Built to clear a backlog of over a million products that would otherwise require manual review. The system applies predefined rules — complete product information, accurate pricing, correct categorisation, guideline compliance — and approves products in configurable batches automatically. Products that pass go live without human intervention; exceptions are routed for manual handling. This turned an impossible manual task into an automated pipeline.

4. Retailer Onboarding & Shopify App

A dedicated Shopify app (and equivalent connectors for other platforms) lets retailers connect their store, sync inventory and product listings, push order details back, and manage the connection — including install/uninstall lifecycle, webhook validation, and token management. Retailers get a "connect and trade" experience rather than a manual upload.

5. Payments — Stripe & Stripe Connect

Full checkout and marketplace payouts. Stripe handles shopper payments; Stripe Connect handles split settlement so funds reach the correct retailer. The platform manages the connect onboarding/redirect flow and per-retailer payout accounts.

6. Shipping & Fulfilment

Native integration with Australian carriers — Australia Post, StarTrack, and Sendle — for live rates and fulfilment, plus configurable shipping zones, distance/geolocation logic, and tax/GST handling so each order is costed and routed correctly.

7. Orders, Returns, Promotions & Tax

End-to-end commerce operations: order management, a returns workflow, promo/discount codes, currency and country handling, and configurable tax/GST rules — all managed from the admin portal.

8. Admin Portal & Reporting

A back-office portal for the Better That team to manage auctions, retailers, products, orders, payments, settings, and shipping — with reporting, an audit log of system activity, and scheduled cron jobs driving recurring tasks (syncs, price drops, reports).

9. Public REST API & Background Services

A documented REST API (betterthatrestapi) exposes catalogue and marketplace data, while separate background service workers handle heavy asynchronous work — imports, syncs, and queue-driven processing via RabbitMQ — keeping the shopper-facing experience fast.

10. Notifications & Communications

Transactional email via SendGrid / Mailgun and SMS messaging keep shoppers and retailers informed across the order and auction lifecycle.

11. Monitoring & Reliability

Sentry error tracking, structured logging (Winston/Morgan), and process supervision (forever) keep the microservices observable and self-healing in production.

Technical Architecture

The system is deliberately split into independent services so the auction engine, the product importer, and the public API can each scale to load without affecting one another.

Outcomes

• One marketplace from many stores — 350+ retailers and 9M+ SKUs unified into a single, real-time master catalogue spanning five different e-commerce platforms
• A genuinely novel commerce model — a working AI-driven reverse-auction engine that prices dynamically to supply, demand, and buyer behaviour, with real-time bidding at scale
• Automation where humans couldn't keep up — a 1M+ product approval backlog cleared through rule-based batch auto-approval instead of manual review
• Recognised R&D — the platform's core innovations (multi-platform master database, dynamic pricing) were substantial enough to be documented across multiple years of formal R&D technical descriptions
• A reusable foundation — the same backend now powers white-label and branded spin-offs (BetterThat Connect and DityBit)

What's Next

• Continued expansion of platform connectors and catalogue scale
• The shared backend underpins BetterThat Connect (white-label marketplaces for charities and clubs) and DityBit (a branded drop-auction storefront) — see their respective case studies

Designed, built, and maintained by Vista SysTech — end-to-end architecture, development, integration, and ongoing support.