Here are some additional notes to the refined PointLoyalty REST API.
What are personalIds – personal identifiers?
When submitting the data on your members to the system you can pass personal identifier (personalId) field for every member. This field is required for your customers to work with the Member Console (view transactions record, active loyalty programs and offers, etc).
You can choose from 3 options to join customers to your programs:
- By matching personalId.
- By matching personalId and email. PersonalId and email of the user who created account in the Member Console should match with information you have associated with this user.
- By matching personalId and password. (PersonalId and password should match).
In any case the customer must know his/her personalId to be able to work with the Member Console.
In most simple case personalId can coincide with memberId and can be credit card number (for offline retail) or system identifier (for online shops).
Why do we establish such a complex system with two identifiers? We want to support as many options as possible. For example, customer transactions data can be submitted with internal identifiers (memberId) but for creating account in the Member Console a customer will get other, human-readable key.
Our system supports complex identification schemes but you can always use (at least for testing) a simplified option – have same identifier for all usage scenarios.