The Company
Super Star Car Wash operates a multi-location car wash business supported by a custom e-commerce and membership management platform. Their system handles customer onboarding, subscription billing, and account management across multiple sites, requiring high reliability in payment processing and user experience.
The Challenge
The platform was experiencing failures in tokenized payment processing during signup, particularly after migrating certain locations to new payment handling systems. These failures were resulting in unsuccessful transactions and lost revenue. Additionally, the system needed to support more nuanced business logic around membership cancellations and improve visibility into service outages.
The Strategy
The Zig focused on stabilizing the payment workflow by analyzing the tokenization process end-to-end, introducing detailed logging, and correcting incorrect aliasing of card data. Alongside this, The Zig implemented new features such as zip code capture and site attribution to improve transaction context, refined frontend UI elements based on client feedback, and introduced monitoring via Datadog to track system health and proactively detect failures.
Key Benefits
The solution restored successful payment processing across affected sites, eliminating signup failures and recovering lost revenue opportunities. The platform became more aligned with the client’s operational requirements, particularly around membership cancellation logic. Monitoring improvements also provided early detection of outages, reducing the risk of disruption to customer transactions.
Key Cost Areas
Primary costs were associated with engineering time spent on debugging payment flows, implementing backend and frontend updates, and configuring monitoring infrastructure. Additional effort was required for testing client-specific edge cases, particularly around payment states and cancellation scenarios.
Lessons Learned
This project reinforced the importance of deeply understanding third-party payment tokenization systems and validating data transformations across services. It also highlighted the value of observability in production systems, where proactive monitoring can prevent revenue-impacting issues. Finally, implementing client-specific business rules requires not just technical accuracy but also enabling clients to test and validate those workflows effectively.