MIT Sloan Management Review hired me as a backend developer to engineer a sophisticated B2B eCommerce engine for their publication. The goal was to modernize their corporate offering by building a custom bridge between their payment processor (Stripe) and their content entitlement engine (Piano). This system needed to support "block" groups of subscribers with tiered pricing, a feature not natively supported by their existing platform. Additionally, I implemented robust server-side analytics to ensure data accuracy for high-value transactions.
Challenges
The project required solving complex architectural problems involving third-party integrations:
- Corporate Subscription Gaps: The existing platform, Piano, excelled at individual subscriptions but lacked the logic to handle corporate "Block" memberships and seat management.
- Complex Billing Tiers: MIT SMR needed to sell tiered access (e.g., 50 vs. 100 seats) with dynamic pricing and automated renewal logic that standard plugins could not support.
- Data Accuracy: Reliance on client-side tracking meant that ad-blockers and privacy filters were creating discrepancies in revenue reporting and attribution.
Solutions
Custom Corporate Billing Engine
- Engineered a custom B2B application that acts as middleware between Stripe and Piano.
- Built a bespoke checkout flow using Stripe APIs to handle high-value corporate transactions, including multi-seat tiers and proration, independent of the standard B2C flow.
- Developed automated provisioning logic that listens for successful Stripe payments and immediately interacts with the Piano API to generate and distribute group licenses, eliminating manual data entry.
Server-Side Analytics & Data Warehousing
- Implemented server-side logging to send transaction data directly from the server to a BigQuery data warehouse.
- Moved analytics logic to the server side to ensure 100% data accuracy for high-value conversions, effectively bypassing browser ad-blockers.
- Configured a direct pipeline where lead generation data is sanitized and stored immediately in the data warehouse for advanced reporting.
Results
Through these backend enhancements, MIT Sloan Review achieved:
- A fully automated Corporate Subscription revenue stream, allowing companies to self-serve purchase and manage employee access.
- Complete operational efficiency by eliminating the need for manual account provisioning and invoicing.
- A centralized, owned data warehouse that provides a single source of truth for revenue and subscriber behavior, unaffected by third-party cookie deprecation.