Automating Marketing for Crowdgames: A Bidirectional Mindbox Integration
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We built a complex, bidirectional Mindbox integration for Russia's largest board game store — enabling triggered email campaigns, abandoned cart recovery, a loyalty program, and personalized product recommendations.
Crowdgames, Russia's largest board game retailer, bought Mindbox for email personalization, abandoned-cart recovery, and product recommendations. None of it ran without a site integration, and none existed, so we built one from scratch.
Connecting Mindbox to a Site With No Existing Blueprint
Project Snapshot
- Client Crowdgames
- Platform Custom Site + Mindbox
- Planned Timeline 28 days
- Actual Timeline 3 months
The Problem
Crowdgames bought Mindbox for its event-based segmentation, triggered email, loyalty program, and product recommendations. None of it worked without a deep integration across the backend and frontend, and no off-the-shelf module existed for their platform. Mindbox's API was also one of the most complex on the market. So the company was paying for a service it couldn't use.
Diagnosis
We mapped Mindbox's requirements. The integration had to run both ways and cover three areas:
- Frontend: a JS SDK to track product and category views, cart additions, and cart changes, without slowing page load.
- Backend: registration, login, profile edits, order creation, and order status and composition changes, all synced to Mindbox via API in real time.
- Infrastructure: DNS and DKIM configuration for email deliverability, plus catalog feeds and a historical data import for segmentation.
Our Approach
No reference architecture existed for this setup, not even on Mindbox's side. The technical specification had to be written from scratch, which took over a month before any code was written.
What We Built
- Frontend SDK: the Mindbox JS SDK, loaded asynchronously so it doesn't affect site speed, tracking product views, cart changes, and cart clearing.
- Backend API Integration: registration, login, profile editing, order creation, and status changes, with separate logic for authenticated and guest users.
- Guest Checkout Handling: guest users are registered in the database automatically, with their discount and promo code saved to their profile.
- Reference Data Setup: 20+ order statuses, payment methods (YooKassa, Split by Yandex Pay), and a YML product feed refreshed every 2 hours.
- Historical Data Import: CSV import of past order data, so segmentation worked from day one instead of starting cold.
- Triggered Emails: confirmation, shipping, and review-request emails tied to order status changes.
- Async Processing & Logging: most operations run asynchronously so the site stays fast, with logs kept for 14 days for debugging.
Challenges With Mindbox Support
The main hold-up was Mindbox's support response times, not the engineering. A +5/+6 timezone gap put replies 5–6 business hours apart. With no comparable prior project in their system, the spec alone took over a month to finalize, and the project ran 3 months against an initial 28-day estimate.
The Results
A stable, fully functional integration with real-time two-way data sync.
The Mindbox Manager plugin runs on the site, and every platform feature is now available. Managers see everything about a customer, from product view to order status, in one profile. The campaigns, loyalty program, and recommendations Crowdgames paid for now work.