PointLoyalty - loyalty programs online

We refined PointLoyalty Manager integration system. Clients can send their data using SSL channels to calculate bonus points earned by their customers.
PointLoyalty REST API remains unchanged. To utilize SSL connections one needs to access REST resources using according protocol:
- HTTP Demo Resource - http://www.pointloyalty.com/wl/rest/demo?login={name:demo, password:demo}&!output-type=XML
- SSL Demo Resource - https://www.pointloyalty.com/wl/rest/demo?login={name:demo, password:demo}&!output-type=XML

Pay attention that if you are using web browsers for viewing demonstration REST resources you need to manually add our website to the list of SSL allowed sites.

Client libraries (Java and PHP) were refactored to support SSL connections (Beta release issued). Take the latest version of client libraries from our site if necessary.

Why integration with our solution is profitable?
If you are a supplier of some software (traditional or SaaS) such as sales tracking system or a e-commerce support software – integration with our product will be very useful to you.
You will get an additional functionality in your product without significant efforts from your side. Your customers will be able to charge bonus points for their clients’ actions and create advanced loyalty programs.

Here are the advantages of integration with our product:
- Additional functionality
When you look for your competitors – you can often find that there is much similarity in offered products. Integration with a customer rewards system “PointLoyalty Manger” will help you to stand out against a background and enhance functionality of your product. Integration is simple and does not require much effort from your side.

- Additional profit
You can make this integration module optional and charge additionally for enabling it. You can charge on subscription base, on amount of established reward programs, on amount of processed transactions, etc

- Cutting costs
In essence we propose you to outsource important but non-core part of your system. This way you don’t need to support this part, spend resources on its further development, bugfixing, etc.

On all integration issues http://www.pointloyalty.com/web20.html - please contact technical support of PoinLoyalty company.

Everyone who uses our API http://www.pointloyalty.com/web20_details.html needs to pay attention that fields declared “optional” are very important at times.

We tried to simplify our API to make it easier to learn the system, but we recommend to study the system documentation especially before using it in production.

Example:
Login object has following fields:
- Name – Client name in PointLoyalty Manager.
- Password – Password.
- Locale – Client language string. ‘EN’ by default.
- TimeZoneId - Timezone. String representation as in Java programming language.

Fields «Locale» and «TimeZoneId» are optional and all tests will work without passing them into the system.
But please consider the following:
- If you not an English speaking user and you do not pass «Locale» parameter you will get all
messages from our services in English; date and time fields will be processed according to US
date/time formats, etc.
- If you are not in US/California (where our servers are) – all empty date/time fields by default will
have current US/California time and not time of your time zone as you could expect.

Errors of this kind are easy to avoid by spending a couple of minutes on reading API documentation.

We continue to answer questions of our users. One of the frequent questions – How to organize bonus points redemption on the client web site using results from PointLoaylty system?
Current version of the system does not have any functionality to support points’ redemption with prizes to program members. We believe this functionality is not required. Every business is so unique that it is almost impossible to come up with a generic solution convenient for everyone.
On other side it is fairly easy to organize the system of rewarding customers with gifts and prizes.
For example:
If a program owner want to create following reward system
- for every 10 earned bonus points give customer an option to choose a gift from list A.
- for every 1000 earned points – gifts from list B.

How to organize this system on your site?
1. Your customer enters your site. You request the amount of bonus points he earned from our system (API - http://www.pointloyalty.com/web20_details.html).
2. Assume he has 45 bonus points.
3. On the page designed to choose gifts you display only items from list A. Items from list B remain invisible.
4. If the customer selects some gift – call our API and reduce amount of his points by 10 points. After choosing 4 gifts, items in list A also become invisible.

Why we don’t want to automate this process?
We don’t know following:
- what design you choose for the page with gifts
- what should happen in your system after customer gets a gift
- do you want to display unavailable gifts to your clients?
- etc

This functionality despite looking simple will be individual for every client.
Of course we will help you with integrating our system with your software; we will take into account all your requirements and answer all your questions. We can also implement this task for you on individual base.

Many people think that loyalty programs do not work or, at least, not much useful in B2B market segment. They claim most important is personal relationships with the partners especially when you work together for a long time. This is true while you have several or at most few dozens of clients. When client base grows there is an evident need for automation. It is not possible to hold in your head the history of interactions with hundreds of your partners.
PointLoyalty Manager makes it possible to create formal rules for rewarding best of your clients based on the history of your relationships. Assign bonus points to your clients for closing specified amount of deals during certain timeframe in the past. Give them discounts for purchasing certain amount of a particular item during all time of your partnership. Assign negative bonuses to clients who decreased purchasing activity…
With PointLoyalty you have endless options to reward your partners paying attention to their partnership record.
To be continued…

Even if your loyalty program is plain simple and you just grant constant bonus points to your customers for every purchase – you need to think does it worth doing it yourself or use the features of our online service.
Yes, simple logic for calculating bonus points can be easily written by your programmers. You probably don’t need more complex rules at the time, but all this are not arguments for reinventing the wheel.
Can you create your own blog engine for your web site? Sure you can, but you will not do it probably. Can you ask your developers to create dynamic graphs on your web pages? Yes, but why – this is already implemented in google online services.
Using our product for automation of your so far simple tasks of bonus calculations you gain a robust platform with extending services and good potential.
Join us! Integration with PointLoyalty Manager.

Answers to additional questions on advanced use of PointLoyalty Manager system.
How to use your system for coalition loyalty programs with a single loyalty operator?

There are no significant differences in single operator mode against casual system’s usage.
Example – let loyalty operator manage common program for N participants.
Loyalty operator in this case is an ordinary client of our system.
- Program members’ base (if required) can be common for all participants (merchants).
- If merchant want to create offer rules for a particular shop – he/she needs to add field “shop” to the list of action attributes and use a filter on shop identifier.
- If certain retail shop needs to have separate product categories – no problems. Our categories are organized as trees – it is easy to create a separate branch of categories.
- Organize loyalty offers in different programs and you will solve the problem having separate reports.
- You don’t even need to have a dedicated application server for the operator – use our hosted “onDemand” solution.

We bypass such tasks as organization of bonus points redemption – this is beyond the the capacity of our system.
For all technical and organizational questions on using PointLoyalty Manager in coalition loyalty programs please contact us support@pointloyalty.com. We will help you to solve any problem.