PointLoyalty - loyalty programs online

Take a look at the “Education Center” page on our web site.
It is sometimes difficult to understand at first sight how our system works and what functionality is available. We of cause provide a full set of documentation and you need to carefully read it when doing deployment or integration project, but when you just need to make yourself familiar with the system it’s an overkill to read all the documentation.

We have made special web site page to get introductory materials easy and fast – “Education Center”. You can see brief system presentation, links to blog articles, etc there.

We hope this page will be useful and let you understand major system features even while briefly browsing the site.

We already wrote about one of our clients idea to use PointLoyalty Manager for calculating bonus points for company employees.

Another interesting idea from our customers is to use PointLoyalty Manager as a system for computation points for a gaming web site. Players registered on this site get bonus points according to complex and frequently changing rule system which also consider previous players’ achievements. We don’t know yet if our collaboration will be successful, but this idea is quite interesting.

Our system was intentionally designed for wide application spectrum and looking at non-standard usage ideas it looks pretty much universal.

This is a short 2-minute presentation to explain once more about what we do

What we do
PointLoyalty company provides SaaS service for processing customer transactions and calculating bonus points for any type of business. Using our system you can assign rewards to your active clients, calculate discounts and keep the record of all client transactions and earned bonus points. In a traditional offline business the type of marketing we offer is called “loyalty programs”.

How it works
1. Describe your business in the system using web-based graphic interface.
Example: assume you are in retail business. Then customer transactions would be “buy” with attributes like “date of purchase”, “product”, “product category”, etc
2. Based on business description create loyalty offers:
Example: customers who purchased something from “clothes” category during “November 2010” and who has previously bought goods worth more then “500” USD will get 100 bonus points (or 5% discount – depends on the type of your loyalty programs).
3. Submit real customer transactions into the system and get results – which customers earned bonus points.

How to submit data for processing
- in online mode - using our API (Web Services, RESTful API).
- send files with data (automatic download from FTP servers)
- directly enter the data on application forms

Privacy protection and confidentiality
- you can pass identifiers of your customers in encrypted
- you can pass a part of transaction information which is required
- you can immediately delete the data after processing
- you can order local installation in your own network

What types of businesses are suitable for the system?
The system is designed to support any kind of businesses – you can calculate bonus points and discounts for purchases if you own an internet shop; or ‘karma’ level and user ratings for clicks and comments – if you own a social network. Main criteria: you work with clients and want to reward them for certain activity.

Informing customers on earned bonus points
You can use MemberConsole – web-based user interface to let your customers view their bonus points. MemberConsole also displays all customer activity, active offers and the history of customer bonus points. You can also develop your own console using our API. Customer account gets automatically created based on incoming data on new clients. For internet shops this task is solved automatically; for offline business – one need to organize the process of filling questionnaires to take part in loyalty program.
Note – we can not automate the process of bonus point’s redemption since it depends heavily on your business but we are ready to help you in organizing this technically.

Competition
There are no direct competitors. One can order development of such system to big SI company. There are also additional software for POS, shopping carts, etc (trivial list of discounts, simple loyalty offers)

Our advantages
- Easy to learn, short time to start
- Use free of charge
- Adopts to any type of business
- Support online processing
- Scalability (support cluster computations)

- We want to remind to all our customers and those who just make themselves familiar with PointLoyalty system – please contact our technical support team if you have any questions.
- We can also arrange a personal presentation using the phone or Skype. Please pay attention that such consulting is free of charge and does not mean you to subscribe for advanced support.

How to integrate bonus processing system PointLoyalty Manager with internet shop to do online calculations of bonus points using PointLoyalty REST API?

Typical tasks you have in your shop:
- Calculate bonus points or discount during the purchase.
- Show the amount of bonus points earned by the client once he enters his account.
- Modify the amount of bonus points if you redeem bonuses in your online shop.

The integration process step by step:
1. Register in PointLoyalty Manager, create loyalty programs, offers, etc
2. Call remote method to calculate bonus points during the purchase
http://www.pointloyalty.com/web20_details.html#actions (POST method)
Pay attention:
- If you want to use calculated amount as a discount – change shopping cart total price accordingly.
- If you want to demonstrate earned bonus points before actual payment take place (f.e. when a client puts an item to the shopping cart) – you will need to delete bonus points if client abandon the purchase. Use DELETE method in this case.
3. After client authentication - show the amount of accumulated bonus points. (If you only use discount – you will need this step)
http://www.pointloyalty.com/web20_details.html#members (GET method)
4. When registering a new client you will need to add her/him to bonus processing system
http://www.pointloyalty.com/web20_details.html#members (POST method)
Pay attention:
- You need to do this step if you want to create loyalty offers based on client attributes
- If you already have a big customer base – you will need to invoke this REST API method for all customers you have.
5. Bonus points redemption
Depending on how you plan to redeem bonus points (gifts, discounts, additional services, …) you will need to decrease amount of points after redemption take place.
- http://www.pointloyalty.com/web20_details.html#bonuses (DELETE method) - to completely clear client bonus points. In this case you will not be able to keep the record of transactions.
- http://www.pointloyalty.com/web20_details.html#adjustments (POST method) – adjust the amount of points on the client account. In this way you could use loyalty offers accounting for client purchase record.
6. If you plan to have loyalty offers based on your product categories (you might give points when purchasing certain product categories, not specific items) – you’ll need to submit this information using PointLoyalty Manager online application.
See also http://www.pointloyalty.com/contacts.html — «Technical links», DTD files.

On all integration issues and question contact our technical support: support@pointloyalty.com.