How We at The Coupon Bureau Built a Real-Time Universal Digital Coupon Platform on AWS
- Lauren
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
At The Coupon Bureau, our mission is to modernize couponing in the U.S. by creating the first universal digital coupon standard — powered by the AI (8112) specification. We aim to improve coupon accuracy, stamp out fraud, and deliver a reliable, interoperable coupon ecosystem that serves manufacturers, retailers, and consumers alike.
To make this vision a reality, we had to build a backend capable of handling billions of coupon transactions — in real time — across a broad and diverse network of providers and retailers. We needed a system that could deliver reliable performance, handle bursts of traffic, integrate with many partners, and preserve trust through secure, standardized redemption logic.
The Challenges We Faced
Massive scale: Our platform needs to support coupon lifecycles at national volume — issuance, sharing, redemption, revocation — potentially billions of events per year.
Low latency at checkout: Redemptions must be validated in under 200 milliseconds to avoid slowing down store checkout lines. Any delay would degrade user experience and retailer confidence.
Reliability & integrity: We can’t afford missing or duplicated redemptions; trust is fundamental. The system must also recover seamlessly from outages without data loss.
Complex integration landscape: With hundreds of providers, third-party platforms, apps, and retailers, we needed a standardized, API-driven, real-time integration framework — to avoid brittle point-to-point systems.
Why AWS
To meet these demands, we built our platform on AWS. The reasons were simple: AWS provides elastic, event-driven, globally available architecture — able to grow seamlessly as adoption expands.
We rely on a suite of managed services — including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon EventBridge, and AWS Lambda — which drastically reduces our operational overhead. That means our small engineering team can focus on innovation and ecosystem growth, rather than infrastructure maintenance.
With Multi-AZ deployments, we ensure data durability and fault tolerance — so even if a region experiences problems, we don’t lose data. Security and compliance, vital for working with major CPG manufacturers and national retailers, are enforced through AWS Identity Access Management (IAM) and AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
As our CTO, Abhijit Das put it: using over 18 AWS services, we can deliver national-scale impact with a surprisingly lean team — fewer than 10 engineers.
At Scale: Performance & Reliability
We stress-tested our platform using distributed load tests across AWS compute resources (EC2), simulating concurrent loads and scaling horizontally as needed. Using AWS Lambda to orchestrate the testing and S3 to store outcomes allowed us to automate the full testing pipeline.
We tested configurations ranging from 8 servers (small load) up to 44 servers (extra-large load). Throughput scaled linearly with load: doubling load doubled throughput — and latency remained stable. At peak, the system comfortably processed 10,000 requests per second, with significant headroom for growth.
Crucially, even under high load, redemption latency stayed under 200 ms — meaning our coupon validation remains fast enough to support smooth checkout experiences.
What This Means for Retailers, Brands & Shoppers
Retailers: Enjoy frictionless coupon redemptions, fewer decline-related slowdowns at checkout, lower fraud risk, and a more streamlined customer experience.
Brands (CPGs and Manufacturers): Get a unified view of redemption data across channels and retailers — enabling accurate ROI measurement, better attribution, and more effective promotional strategies.
Shoppers (Consumers): Access consistent, reliable coupons across apps, stores, and retailers — with real-time validation, regardless of where or how they choose to shop.
In short: our platform transforms coupons from disjointed retailer-specific offers into a seamless, trusted, universal savings ecosystem.
In Summary
By leveraging AWS’s cloud infrastructure and suite of managed services, we at The Coupon Bureau have built a first-of-its-kind, real-time, universal digital coupon exchange — powered by the AI (8112) standard, scalable to national levels, and capable of delivering secure, reliable, low-latency coupon redemption across hundreds of retailers, providers, and consumer touchpoints.
If you’re a manufacturer, retailer, app developer, or coupon platform and want to explore how universal coupons can help you — let’s connect. We’ve built the rails — now it’s time to ride.
