30K+ Easy Logins at Best Buy’s GeekSquad with BigCommerce SSO

Challenge

The Geek Squad division at Best Buy engaged miniOrange to resolve their intricate identity and access management requirements for their employee benefits e-commerce platform. The subsidiary serving 30,000 employees needed to grant service tenure-based product access while maintaining full integration with their infrastructure with PingIdentity as an existing identity provider.

Geek Squad's employee benefits platform encountered several critical obstacles that hindered their digital transformation:

• Complex Tenure-Based Access Control: The employee benefits platform of Geek Squad faced multiple essential problems that blocked their digital transformation efforts:

The organization required a system to grant employees access to different BigCommerce product categories through their years of service duration:

• 18 months of service
• 60 months (5 years) of service
• 10 years of service
• 15 years of service
• 20+ years of service (including 25, 30+ year tiers)
• Legacy System Limitations: The previous e-commerce solution used Orange Pages to determine service tenure through date calculations followed by URL parameter addition for SSO, but this approach proved insecure and hard to maintain.
• Identity Provider Constraints: Best Buy encountered restrictions in their existing identity provider as their primary IdP because they could not update user attributes directly, which prevented them from storing dynamic tenure calculations in their existing directory structure.
• BigCommerce Integration Requirements: The new BigCommerce platform needed customer_group_id attributes to determine product access levels but required dynamic calculations and synchronization instead of static storage.
• Scalability and Performance Needs: The solution needed to manage high-volume SSO requests while delivering sub-second response times because it served 30,000 users who needed real-time access to appropriate products based on their tenure.

The Geek Squad team needed a partner to connect their users in their existing IdP infrastructure with the BigCommerce platform and deliver dynamic user attribute management solutions.

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Result

The implementation of miniOrange at BestBuy's Geek Squad shows how modern IAM solutions can connect legacy systems with modern e-commerce platforms while providing dynamic user management capabilities.

Immediate Business Impact:

• Enhanced Employee Experience: The SSO solution provided a smooth experience that eliminated password fatigue and reduced login friction by 95% so employees could concentrate on accessing their appropriate benefits instead of dealing with authentication difficulties.
• Dynamic Product Access Control: The system successfully implemented tenure-based product categorization for 30,000 employees, which granted automatic benefits access based on years of service without human intervention.
• Scalable Architecture Performance: The solution maintains sub-second response times during peak concurrent usage during benefit enrollment periods, thus supporting business-critical operations without performance degradation.
• Operational Efficiency Gains: The reduction of 88% in IT support tickets for authentication and access problems allowed technical teams to dedicate their resources to strategic initiatives and platform enhancements.
• Seamless Legacy Integration: The solution maintained full compatibility with existing IdP infrastructure while introducing advanced IAM features to protect organizational investments in identity management systems.
• Future-Ready Platform: The flexible architecture enables support for additional tenure tiers and new product categories and an expanded user base without needing system redesign or major configuration changes.
• Cost-Effective Implementation: The implementation eliminated the requirement for costly customizations or BigCommerce platform modifications because intelligent middleware connector solutions delivered enterprise-grade functionality.

About BestBuy Geek Squad

Best Buy's Geek Squad operates as North America's leading technology services division, providing comprehensive tech support and services to millions of customers. The division's commitment to employee satisfaction and benefits accessibility aligns perfectly with miniOrange's advanced IAM capabilities, demonstrating how intelligent identity management enhances employee engagement and operational efficiency in large-scale retail technology organizations.