Just Eat: creating winning partnerships

Alongside a direct mail, preparing Partners with relevant information, Just Eat wanted to take the opportunity to spread a little joy during the festive period.

The challenge

The festive period is typically the busiest time for Just Eat’s restaurant and grocery Partners. Their customers are ordering food after a long day of shopping or ordering groceries to host a festive gathering putting pressure on to make the most of the time of year.

As Partners had faced a tough year though high inflation and cost of living we were asked to create an interactive “scratch to match” game which could be accessed from the DM giving Partners the chance to win one of 1,800 prizes ranging from shopping vouchers, gym passes and wearable tech.

The objective was to build and retain positive Partner relationships with the Just Eat business updates - and giving back a little to say thank you.

The solution

As there was no requirement for the platform to have content management, we took the opportunity to implement a Laravel driven PHP backend and a ReactJS powered user interface to create quick, flexible and intuitive web application.

The application was only available after receiving the festive mailer, so the design for the application had to aligned to that, with Just Eat branding to ensure consistency of experience for the Restaurant Partner. The mailer contained a QR code which was the only way to the prize site.

Being publicly available on the Internet, though not promoted, we needed to consider how to prevent un-authorised access to the prize mechanism. We ensured that only partners could take part in the competition by requiring two-factor authentication as a login to access the scratch game.

Creating the app with Laravel meant we needed to design all aspects of the application and database – The primary function was to design a method of prize allocation following the rules defined by Just Eat. As everyone who completed the scratchcard won a prize, so we only needed to ensure that the prizes were allocated randomly across the entrants and to prevent duplication.

The full prize list was stored alongside the partner list in the database, once a card had been successfully scratched, the partner’s details and their given prize was stored to ensure we had an audit trail, reporting capabilities and limited one prize per partner.

The competition mechanism was brought to life through the experience of revealing a scratch card on a digital device. We designed custom icons which needed to be matched to win a prize which were gradually shown as the Restaurant Partner rubbed the screen or moved their cursor over the scratch area.

Prizes were fulfilled through an integration with platform Huggg, which allowed Partners to manage the delivery of their prize.

Once all prizes had been won, the application closed the give-away automatically updating the UI with messaging on the site changed to confirm the competition had ended and preventing further logins.