Precious metal commodity API, KYC & e-commerce

Brief

Integrate a live pricing API feed into an existing e-commerce platform so that platinum, gold, and silver could be purchased with up to the minute pricing. Implement a 3rd party KYC (know-your-customer) validation platform (Labgroup).

Context

In 2017 I was still doing a lot of consulting and freelance work for studios that developed e-commerce and digital marketing solutions. One of these was Digital Thing, a digital creative agency in Melbourne.

One of their customers required their e-commerce platform to be upgraded and I was brought in to assist with the required features. They needed precious metal commodity pricing on their site to be live, and they also needed a way to integrate this into their existing e-commerce platform.

Solution

I ended up building a custom plugin module that worked with their existing e-commerce platform so that product prices were pulled from API rather than the internal DB. Prices would then be maintained in the cart for a certain period of time for the user to check-out and then refresh upon a specified timer expiry.

The site also required that customers be validated by a 3rd party KYC platform. To do this, I also built another custom module that integrated the default user account creation process into the KYC loop.

This was an interesting and cha project that allowed me to work with some APIs I had not played with yet and to learn how to make some extensive modifications to the e-commerce platform to allow the features they required.