Gift Cards Market is an e-commerce marketplace for restaurant gift cards in the US and Canada. Customers search for restaurants and businesses, then buy their gift cards online.
Key features
- Business discovery and search. Restaurant data comes from the Yelp and Google Places APIs, so customers can search and browse businesses near them.
- Online payments through Stripe.
- Notifications by email (SendGrid) and SMS (Twilio) for purchases and delivered gift cards.
- Asynchronous processing with RabbitMQ for work that should not block the checkout request.
- Caching with Redis for frequently requested data.
Stack
- Front end: React and Next.js.
- Backend: ASP.NET Core APIs, Redis, RabbitMQ.
- Third-party services: Stripe, Yelp, Google Places, SendGrid, Twilio.
My contribution
As a Software Engineer on the team, I built features across the ASP.NET Core backend and the React/Next.js front end, including work on the third-party integrations that power search, payments and notifications.
What I learned
GCM depends on many external services, each with its own rate limits, failure modes and data formats. It taught me to treat every integration as unreliable: put slow or fragile work on a queue, cache what can be cached, and make retries safe.
This is a company project, so the source code is private.