What is White Labeling?
“White Labeling” (also known as “skinning”) is a common UI/UX term used for a product or service that is produced by one company and rebranded by another, giving the appearance that the product or service was created by the marketer (or the company s/he represents). Rebranding has been used with products ranging from food, clothing, vehicles, electronics and all sorts of online wares and services.
For many of Tipalti’s customers, white labeling is key to providing a seamless payment experience for payees such as publishers, affiliates, crowd and sharing economy partners, and resellers. Rather than take a user out of one portal to a third party site and break the communication chain, Tipalti enables the paying company to deeply embed the functionality within their own experience.
How does white labeling work in Tipalti?
Tipalti’s payee portal is fully customizable, allowing our customers to match their corporate brand to every step of the onboarding and management process. For example, entering their contact data, selecting their payment type, completing tax forms, and tracking their invoicing and payment status are all aspects that a payee would need to see and can be presented with the customer’s brand. Customers use their own assets to ensure a seamless look and feel in any payee-facing content.
To support the wide array of branding while maintaining a consistent code-base for all customers, we built the payee portal using LESS.
What is LESS?
CSS preprocessors are a staple in web development. Essentially, CSS pre-processors extend plain CSS into something that looks more like a programming language.
LESS was created in 2009 by Alexis Sellier, also known as @cloudhead, and it has become one of the most popular preprocessors available and has also been widely deployed in numerous front-end frameworks like Bootstrap. It adds to CSS programming traits such as Variables, Functions or Mixins, and Operations, which allows web developers to build modular, scalable, and more maintainable CSS styles.
Click here for more information on how LESS works, syntax and tools.
How LESS is used for white labeling?
Let’s assume you want to use LESS for styling a blog post. Your LESS CSS stylesheet will look something like this:
@post-color: black;
@post-background-color: white;
@sub-post-
color
:
white
;
@sub-post-
background-color
:
black
;
.post {
color
: @post-color;
background-color
: @post-background-color;
.sub-post {
background-color
: @sub-post-background-color;
color
: @sub-post-color;
}
}
With this styling, the blog post will roughly look like this:
After awhile, let’s say you made contact with a new business partner. The partner wants to display your blog post inside their website, but since the color scheme of the blog post does not match the general style of the partner’s website, they want to create a custom styling that will match their color scheme. This is essentially the process of “white labeling.”
So how do you change the styling to match both color schemes?
This all can be done only in plain CSS, but imagine having to override each CSS class in your blog stylesheet for each theme. Not that attractive, right?
If you are using LESS, the solution is simple. You’ll just override the variables related to each property you are willing to change. The changes are all concentrated in a single location, which makes applying them much easier, faster and less prone to errors.
If your partner prefers the post background color to be blue, you will simply need to do the following:
- Create another LESS file
- Inside of it add the line “@post-background-color: blue; “
- Compile the new LESS file after compiling the original one
That’s all it takes to achieve the wanted layout change. No need to worry that you forgot to update any CSS classes.
Complex LESS customizations in Tipalti
For our product, each Tipalti customer can easily customize their own payee portal simply by overriding variables in their own LESS file.
The array of possible customizations reaches far more than colors. For example, our customers are able to change the layout of fieldsets, icons, buttons, elements positions, width/height calculations and more. Because of LESS, the rebranding never interferes with the common code, which is important as there is a lot of intelligence built into our payee portal. Likewise, the customer never has to write any custom code around the logic and execution of the processes. When you’re dealing with something as complex as global payments and validations on payment methods, this is incredibly important.
Here are examples of two very different LESS override stylesheets applied on the same base stylesheet:
Other uses for LESS
LESS is very useful when you’re developing services for customers that feature their brand, but it’s also very clean and efficient for creating a flexible user interface and user experience for your product. For example, when you have many repeated elements that need to be styled, LESS can simplify the effort with variables, operators, and mixins for cross-browser and mobile/responsive support.