BloxBoom

Founder & Software Engineer

Oct 2023 - Present

BloxBoom is an online marketplace for buying virtual items and accessories for popular Roblox experiences, offering instant automated delivery and 24/7 support.

BloxBoom is Roblox's premier online marketplace for players looking to purchase digital cosmetics with instant automated delivery, 24/7 customer support and a trustworthy name. The platform facilitates over 100,000 annual purchases across 18 Roblox games in 8 languages.

Bringing learnings from previous successful ventures into Rocket League, BloxBoom solves the uncertaintainty, fraud, slow transactions and inconvenient experience of coordinating peer-to-peer cash trades by providing a trusted centralised store.

Engineering & Architecture

While OP.Market and RLSwaps focused engineering efforts on trading frequency, order volume and reducing latency, BloxBoom prioritise a robust and error-free user experience, with a higher bar set user experience and fail-safes. The platform is built on a TypeScript-first stack (Next.js, React, Nest.js, PostgreSQL, Redis) and is tightly integrated with Shopify for inventory management and the checkout experience. We handle payments via Cybersource to take advantage of their more robust security and fraud protections, handling anything that slips through with Disputifier.

• TypeScript-First: end-to-end typing from the React frontend to the Nest.js backend (including the PostgreSQL database schema using Prisma) keeps our data contracts honest. We employee tRPC to provide typesafe communication and deploy changes simultaneously as all of our code sits in a monorepo. As much of the more complex logic happens on the frontend, with reliability of the end-user experience being the priority, complete typesafety ensures we build a resilient UI.
• Next.js: while Next.js has some downsides over simpler JS frameworks, namely a complex build system, unstable APIs, and a clear preference towards Vercel's expensive first-party hosting, the framework does provide a set of very useful features. BloxBoom makes heavy use of SSR and ISR to provide fast initial loads and web-crawler friendly pages for all our blog posts that are pulled from our headless CMS, Sanity. Furthermore, the recent emphasis on server components and server rendering by the development team is helping bring down React's bloated bundle sizes and provide a snappy experience for our users. Features such as route pre-fetching and global layouts blend the response navigation of a SPA with the aforementioned benefits of SSR.
• Backend: in order to minimise latency, BloxBoom uses a variety of caching techniques. The first layer the user interacts with is our globally distributed edge network that serves statically regenerated pages within 300ms. Then, our API built on Nest.js maintains a Redis cache of our inventory, prices and currency conversions, protected by reservation locks to prevent stale-cache issues. BloxBoom lazily persists data in PostgreSQL to ensure consistency while keeping user interactions quick.
• Automated Delivery: BloxBoom's automated 24/7 instant delivery is key selling point of the store and is accomplished through a series of parallelised Android emulators through MumuPlayer. Communication is handled through ADB and over WebSockets once the Roblox clients have been injected with our bespoke bootloader scripts. This system allows for scripting and hot-reloading of code written in Lua, Roblox's user-facing scripting language.
• Shopify: modern engineering often suggests building your own inventory system, payment flows and analytics ecosystem, however BloxBoom uses Shopify as it is suprisingly inexpensive at scale and cuts down hugely on engineering costs and is thoroughly battle-tested. The platform acts as a source of truth for our inventory, handles tax obligations and provides a vibrant plugin ecosystem for analytics, marketing and payment processing.
• Internal Metics & Monitoring: BloxBoom uses TripleWhale and Grafana to build live data visualisations both for monitoring and internal metrics. Our dashboards help us monitor marketing efforts, affiliate performance, make stocking prediction and monitor for anomalies in site performance. As learnt the hard way in earlier ventures, having automatic alerts and relevant data can help catch bugs or security issues early, before too much damage is done.
• Scripts & Internal Tools: scripts and internal tools use a variety of languages such as TypeScript, Python and Rust. These tools power anything from translation management to performant proxies or machine learning models.

Anti-Fraud

One of the biggest problems facing BloxBoom and other stores in the gaming space is fraud. Given game costmetics carry real value with very little tracability or ability to reverse transactions, fraudsters often try to use stolen credit cards to quickly extract money. What results are a lot of chargebacks, which are thrice expensive as they seem on the surface. Not only do you lose the value of the original transaction, payment providers normally charge a fee (oftentimes more than the transaction itself) and you also lose the inventory. To combat this, BloxBoom uses a variety of strategies:

• 3DS: 3D Secure is the most surefire way to prevent fraud. It is a system implemented by most modern banks (but no quite all), that usually asks for some kind of 2FA from the cardholder before approving a transaction. This method can add some friction but thankfully it is being improved with 3DS2. Forcing 3DS ensures that chargebacks nearly never happen, with the caveat being that some banks do not support the feature, resulting in lost sales.
• Custom Fraud Rules: manually defined rules based on the order contents, the transaction itself and other metadata determine whether a transaction should be held for further manual review before delivering. Oftentimes, this involves contacting the customer via email or live chat to verify their identity or request proof of access to the account from which the card draws from.
• Ethoca & RDR Chargeback Alerts: incoming chargeback defenece. Given that financial institutions often side with the customer, once a dispute is raised, a chargeback is almost inevitable. Incoming disputes can be detected and automatically refunded before they officially become chargebacks, even though the order has already been delivered by this point. These notifications come in the form of Ethoca or RDR alerts, which are sent to Disputifier to action upon. Almost all orders except very high value orders are immediately refunded, stopping the chargeback process in its tracks. While the value of the transaction and inventory is lost, the chargeback fee is avoided.
• Disputifier: finally, if a chargeback eventuates, it is fought (and often won) automatically by submitting evidence to counter the fraud claim. Screenshots, timestamps and other actions taken by the customer are logged and used as evidence in this process.

With all these measures in place, currently BloxBoom experiences a 0.3% dispute rate. This is important for keeping payment processors happy, as a high dispute rate risks could prompt them to kick your business off their platform and push you onto high risk (and high fee) processors. Roughly 80% of these chargebacks are fought and subsequently won, further reducing losses. In all, these measures keep us in good standing with Visa, Mastercard and our payment processors while simultaneously reducing losses.

Customer Trust

One of BloxBoom's main assets is customer trust. Our primary audience is not so much the young people that play Roblox, but rather their parents that ultimately pay for the cosmetic items we deliver.

• Trustpilot: is a well known way to quickly verify a website online. While no presence on Trustpilot isn't necessarily a red flag, as many business do not go to the effort of setting up a profile, a swarm of positive reviews is certainly a very good sign. Trustpilot is good at filtering out fake reviews, requiring purchase proof from users to ensure that the platform doesn't give out positive ratings to undeserving sites. BloxBoom maintains a strong 4.6 star rating from over 2,500 reviews, signalling instantly that we deliver upon what we promise.
• Taking Down Impersonators: with the reputation that BloxBoom has, we get many impersonators, spinning up similar domains and cloning our website in order to defraud unsuspecting buyers. Despite the fact that these scams are not affiliated with us in any way, their use of our brand can hurt our perception. As such, we employ Netcraft's threat detection and takedown service to find and remove impersonators.
• Clear Refund Policy: we never keep money for items that aren't claimed or delivered. If an order is not satisfied with 24 hours, then the customer is automatically entitled to a full refund, and we will even process is it without them requesting. This includes if they simply forget to accept the items from our bots. This policy is fair and builds trust with our customer base. You will get what you paid for, or your money will be automatically returned.
• Transparent Process: we publish guides detailing the delivery process for those unfamiliar with Roblox in order to make the experience as seamless as possible. From launching the game and joining our bot's lobby, we explain every step so that customers are always sure as to what comes next.

Growth & Marketing

Given BloxBoom exists with a fairly competitive market of other stores selling the same Roblox cosmetics, marketing is essential to sell what makes the BloxBoom experience different and better. Through a mixture of traditional ads, viral content, influencer collaborations, SEO and an affiliate system, we explore all possible mechanisms to drive positive traffic to our store.

• Traditional Advertisements: BloxBoom runs online ads through all the biggest players; Google, Microsoft, Meta, Snapchat & TikTok. These campaigns are monitored and created by a dedicated team that adjusts spends, messaging and promotion to maximise ROAS.
• Viral Content: while often overlooked, viral content is an incredibly cheap method to garner huge amounts of organic attention to your product. BloxBoom publishes engaging short form video content across TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts in a variety of languages to promote the store. Beyond the time taken to create the content, posting is free and can sometimes bring in millions of views.
• Influencer Collaborations: a surefire way to reach a large, targetting audience is sponsor influencers for promotional segments in their content. Often taking the form of a quick ad-read during a video, influencers lend their reputation and reach to your exact audience, often yielding better results that simple online ad campaigns.
• SEO: a huge part of remaining relevant online is catering towards search engines, and nowadays, AI crawlers. Producing a lot of high-quality content relevant to your product by creating blogs is a tried and true way of boosting search engine rankings. BloxBoom has a dedicated team of writers that publish a new article on the latest trends in Roblox everyday, providing players with valuable and up-to-date information, while also serving as promotional material for the store.
• Affiliate System: any customer, regardless of their social media presence can join BloxBoom's affiliate program to earn a commission on any sale they bring in. This allows up and coming content creators to promote the website, while earning credit to receive free items from our store. The system is a win-win-win for everyone involved. New customers receive an exclusive discount when using an affiliate code, affiliates get kickbacks and BloxBoom benefits from the extra traffic and grassroots exposure.

While some of these methods are more commonplace than others, lesser used growth techniques such as viral content prodution and a strong affiliate system have proven to scale well in previous ventures such as OP.Market. While less direct forms of advertising, they have the potential to scale exponentially, rather than linearly with advertising spend, making them good choices for explosive growth.