Cross Browser Extension for Referral Earnings

Designed and implemented a cross browser plugin/extension for a charity based on the Crossrider framework / API. The plugin creates a local cache of participating merchant URLs who pay a referral fee for any referrals that come from the charity website. The local cache of participating merchants is periodically refreshed by web workers which pull JSON data from a centralized server without effecting the user experience.

Once the plugin is installed it parses search results from google, bing and yahoo and replaces any matched merchant URLs with a custom URL that links to a redirecter page on the charity website. An icon is placed next to the matching URL to let the user know that the link is for an approved site.

On clicking the link, the user is required to accept the agreement terms for donating referral fees to the charity and the redirector page simply logs the hit and further redirects to the actual merchant URL. This is similar to what google does when you click on a search result. The idea is for participating shoppers to allow for their referral fees earnings to be donated to the charity website as compared to some other referring website. The plugin was primarily tested on chrome and firefox. We had to customize the  javascript code to get it to work for Internet Explorer which also required a security certificate on the charity website.