Case Studies

Songbird

BargainMatch

BargainMatch : Extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer

When Inuvo launched BargainMatch in 2010, they knew that a killer website was only part of the picture. BargainMatch is a comparison shopping and cash-back service with over 1,700 participating online retailers. Through it consumers can find the best prices for over five million products and earn cash back on almost everything they buy.

The Challenge

Shoppers won’t always have the impulse to visit the BargainMatch website before making a purchase, so a browser extension that alerts them when cash back or coupons are available was an integral part of the plan. Inuvo’s engineers had built a top-notch back-end for the service, but due to the specialized nature of the task, they decided to seek a partner with core expertise in browser add-on development to deliver a professional-quality extension for all major browser platforms.

The Result

After the first version delivered by an outside contractor failed to meet Inuvo’s high standards of quality, they turned to Salsita. The result: a Firefox version of the extension was released on Inuvo’s website in July 2011 to widespread accolades.

“We turned to Salsita for help developing our BargainMatch browser extension because of the experience they had in building several highly successful apps for other clients,” explains Jeremy Chrysler, Senior Vice President of Inuvo’s Exchange. “We had high hopes for our app, and Salsita helped us exceed those expectations in every regard.”

Salsita CEO Matthew Gertner adds, “A client like Inuvo makes it easy for us to succeed. They provided us with a clear spec with detailed user interface mockups, unfortunately something of a rarity in our business. The fact that they had already deployed a rock-solid server-side API was also invaluable.”

Following successful completion of the Firefox extension, Salsita’s innovative use of the Model-View-Controller architecture enabled the creation of a version for Internet Explorer that shares the majority of the existing JavaScript source code.

“Development of sophisticated extensions for Internet Explorer is an order of magnitude harder than for Firefox or Chrome,” says Gertner. “At Salsita we hire world-class systems developers, not web coders. That’s why we were able to port the BargainMatch extension to IE while preserving all of the functionality and much of the same code as the Firefox version, something that will pay dividends down the road as we continue to maintain and extend both versions in parallel.”

A Chrome version is also planned and will use the same shared code base as the existing releases.