The main group of our customers is small and medium business companies, which cannot afford the development of their own bonus programs, and either didn’t use them or were involved into coalition programs.
Primary market – retail (10% of the total number of loyalty programs participants), including e-trade, social networks and communities that need flexible systems of rating calculation.
Global market – USA ($1.2 billion on loyalty programs support in 2003, $2 billion- in 2009), also Europe– about €1.5 billion. In e-trade the approximate world expenses on loyalty programs amount to $200 billion.

Current status

SaaS service of PointLoyalty is fully developed and available in Russian and English versions.
Currently, we are improving the service features and entering into cooperation with partner companies:
• Technology companies: such as a company, involved in SMS informing, POS, RMS systems developers.
• Partners involved in product promotion: SaaS marketplaces, system integrators, marketing agencies.

Investments

Investment money will be focused on the following areas:
1. Product development:
• Accounting systems integration.
• POS terminals and RMS systems integration.
• Add support for coalition loyalty programs.
2. Promotion, advertisement.
3. Office, technical support, equipment.

The main problems faced by small and mid-size companies when implementing loyalty programs include:

• High price of software offered by software development companies ($0.5-2 million), or the need to create their own processing systems for bonus programs.
• Lengthy time until the launch of the program. New development takes about 1 year, setting up the current one takes no less than 6 months.
• All existing solutions offer a limited number of bonus schemes, essentially repeating the discount models and not taking into account customer types and history of relations with the customers.

Solution and technology

SaaS service of PointLoyalty Company is a solution of the above problems. SaaS service is a universal system which allows you to establish the rules of the program and, based on these rules, to calculate bonuses for loyalty programs’ clients working for small and medium-sized enterprises.

SaaS solution from PointLoyalty Company is a service fostering the new generation of customer loyalty programs. This software has the following properties:

• Availability – the full featured standard edition of the service is free of charge.
• Usability – it takes 20 minutes to create a new version of the running loyalty program.
• Flexibility – the system is operated by marketing specialist and supports all necessary rules to stimulate customers’ purchasing activity with no IT department involvement.

Competitors

• System integrators doing customization and deployment of ready solutions for loyalty programs (e.g. – Manzana Loyalty) or in the development of custom software (e.g. – Vesdia, Comarch). These integrators hold a high price bracket which is not our priority for the first three years.
• Companies offering simple, pre-defined systems for bonus calculation to loyalty program customers (e.g. – StickyStreet). The functionality of our solution considerably exceeds the functionality of such competitors.
• Software designed for POS systems (standard discount systems, simple bonus programs) is not suitable for e-trade and doesn’t focus on customization.

Business model

The following represent a number of ways for the service monetization:
• Charge for the technical support.
• Subscription fee for full featured system.
• License sales if the system is used in customer’s network.
• System integration with client’s software.
• Consulting.

The main competitive advantages of our Company:
• It takes minimum time to start a project – without administrative delays the running program startup takes a few days.
• Free of charge use for small projects and for any type of projects in the implementation and testing phase.
• Easy integration with external applications – support for online data transfer (REST API, web services) and significant data volumes (data files downloading, transfer via FTP etc.).
• Ready made module for communications with members of loyalty programs (view bonus points, see offers and promotions).
• Scalability – supports cluster computing.

It is better to spend marketing budget on specialists managing loyalty offers, not to develop your own software solutions.

Software is indeed secondary, don’t waste your precious time on it – use our system.

It is often not really necessary to process all user actions immediately online (despite PointLoyalty Manager does not put any limitations for such use). More frequently it is enough to refresh the ratings once per day.

In this case the internet resource owner need to setup Cron task sending user activity record for past time period. The server load will be distributed better. Other way to improve site responsiveness is to send actions after user logout.

Marketing forums novice members always ask such a question and never get a straight answer. This happens because it is impossible to give answer not asking in turn – what exactly you plan to do?
Here are some issues you need to take into account.
Time and human resources must be spent on:
- study previous experience,
- choosing strategy,
- training personnel,
- adopt customer care procedures,
- order, install and setup support software,
- educate employees to use the software,
- establish channels for rewarding customers,
- etc

Further it depends on you.
If your company is a big clumsy monster – you’ll stuck in months of official red tape. If your company is fast and mobile – everything is not that ugly.
It is easier to establish such programs for companies working in online business sphere.
Their advantages are mobility, technically advanced personnel and high initial level of business automation.

When our solution is used as a technical platform for creating bonus points based loyalty programs – pilot version of the system can be launched within one week timeframe.

Consider following example:
Let’s assume we have customer action – “purchase” with a set of attributes: product, category,
price, amount, total sum, date of purchase, etc. A customer purchased two items:
- product – X, category – commodity goods, price – 100 dollars, quantity – 5 items, total sum – 500 dollars, purchase date – 1/1/2010 11:00.
- product Y, category – other goods, price – 200 dollars, quantity – 1 item, total sum – 200 dollars, purchase date – 1/1/2010 11:00.
I.e. for one purchase there are 2 records created in the system.
It is obvious how to create reward rules for buying product X, or for buying a product from category “other goods” or for a purchasing items with cost more then 150 dollars.
But sometimes it is required to assign bonus points if total purchase sum is larger then N dollars. In this case the product, its category and quantity will be ignored.
What to do in this case?
If you can simplify the processing rules – send only one record representing the total purchase with attributes: total sum, purchase date. In our case it will be following action:
- total sum – 700 dollars, date of purchase – 1/1/2010 11:00.
And create a reward rule depending on total purchase sum.
So, with some preliminary data processing it is possible to solve vast majority of such problems without changing the PointLoyalty Manager system.

2) It is added the possibility of full customization of «User console» for customer’s needs
-  Support of Company’s logotype.
- Support of application’s form  (CSS).
- Support service’ address has been changed.
(See Pointloyalty Manager “Registration page”)
3) the utility for adjustment of application’s form has been developed

4) The detailed description of integration process with “User console” has been added. The given description contains the detailed examples and recommendations on the application’ using.
http://www.pointloyalty.com/member_console.html

To resume — the possibility of full integration of widget “User console” with your sites has been added.

The future plans — to provide with plugins for integration with support systems of e-commerce.

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.