PointLoyalty - loyalty programs online

We have met various offer rules while developing software for loyalty programs management.
Designing our system we wanted it to support any kinds of bonus calculation rules depending on the current purchase and the history of previous customer behavior. Sometimes people say they don’t need such universal approach and their rules are simple and straightforward. We tried to recall the most complicated rule we had to support according to customer requirements:

Assign N% from purchase sum as bonus points
- if customer is from category “X”
- if the purchased item belongs to subcategories “A” and “B” (2 rules in fact)
- if the purchase is made during certain timeframe
- if there were purchases of goods from “Z” category (during certain timeframe)
- the sum of previous purchases were less then M (during certain timeframe)

And only if all of these conditions are met we add N% to customer’s account.

We don’t actually know how such complex rule was explained to customers - this is not our business – at present time we support even more complex rules. As to questions on whether to use complex rules – the client is always right

PointLoyalty company released an integration module for shopping cart solution from KonaKart company.
Using PointLoyalty integration plugin will give following advantages to net-shop owner:
- Lots of options in creating bonus reward programs for customers. Bonus programs are managed in SaaS solution from PointLoyalty company.
- Informing customers about current reward offers, allow customers to track their purchase record, earned bonus points and past redemptions.

Flexible plugin and member console settings make possible to customize application look and feel and tune it according website design.
Tunable things are:
- Information displayed to customers – like bonus points, purchase record.
- Member Console design – colors, fonts, etc
- Customer notification options

This solution will be useful for all KonaKart-powered netshop owners and to all those interested in online integration with PointLoyalty system.

About PointLoyalty company:
PointLoyalty company offers SaaS system for online management of bonus loyalty programs. For any size and type of business there is an effective solution for consumer rewards program management.

See more details on the company website
http://www.pointloyalty.com

New version of REST API and Web Services for integration with SaaS customer loyalty system PointLoyalty Manager is released.
New version has following changes:
- Few small bugs were fixed .
- Added several utility resources to simplify integration with external systems. Details…
- In PointLoaylty Manager and Member Console the bug with date type data coming from various locations was fixed.
- java library PointLoyalty java rest client was extended to support new API features.
Remind you that new versions of services and libraries are always compatible with prior releases.

Us usual – from our email exchange:
Pay attention that we DO NOT provide full scale trainings on loyalty programs organization for your particular business. We assume you have marketing people responsible for business development or you use services from according consulting companies. We can only give some hints on what to start with, or point out some common marketing issues besides full technical support on establishing loyalty system in your organization.
So, in our trainings we concentrate on all technical issues in using bonus programs, details of PointLoyalty Manager functioning and some initial steps of overall organization of customer rewards system in your company. In any case if we encounter marketing issues which go beyond our competency we will recommend marketing specialists for you.

From the list of frequently asked questions…

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.

From time to time we get requests to add administrator console to have control over multiple clients having their own loyalty programs, i.e. to add master-administrator mode.
At this time we think there is a better way to handle such problem. If you want to act as a loyalty program operator – you can create multiple individual loyalty offers for your partners using a single account in the system.
In this case you will be able to create offers with separate settings for each partner (action attributes, etc) and will be able to get reports for each partner separately and combined reports for all partners.
With this scheme only you can create loyalty offers, but that’s what you need if you want to control the process of creating partner loyalty offers.
If you need that your partners could create loyalty offers by themselves and you only get reports on every partner – make several accounts (one for each partner). The task of creating additional reports we will perform as a customization services.
In case of local installation of PointLoyalty Manager on your servers you will have access to all system data and will not experience such problems at all.
Please contact our sales department and we will be able to find convenient solution for your needs sales@pointloyalty.com.

While testing the integration with e-commerce systems and after analyzing feedback from our customers who also do integration with PointLoyalty Manager we decided to extend our external access interfaces (REST API, web services). New features will help simplify integration works. We will publish new Java and PHP libraries in a couple of weeks and update system’s server part. New libraries will be backward compatible of course.
Sometimes we get requests to introduce same REST API for loyalty programs and offers management and to provide a way for autonomous processing without human intervention. At this point in time we don’t intend to extend the API in this direction.
Reasons:
- Programs and offes are relatively stable. Once you have defined rules it is unlikely you want to change them frequently. There is no necessity to dynamically create or change them.
- Besides, users can get confused in all different kinds of rules and programs we have in our system (simplicity vs. versatility). In our PointLoyalty Flash GUI we simplified a lot of things for loyalty program managers, but it is really hard to provide simple and powerful external API for this task.

We don’t want our users to get confused – use our rich Flash client to define your bonus offers and you will not get lost in a multitude of options our system provides.

Development news.

We finished development of a plugin for e-commerce solution http://www.konakart.com.

The following functionality is implemented:
- Passing shop client information into our bonus processing system PointLoyalty Manager (optionally, when there is a need to create loyalty offers based on member attributes).
- Automatic creation of accounts in Member Console application. Every authorized internet shop client is able to see earned bonus points.
- Administrator panel with plugin settings.
- Customization, tuning of error reports.

The plugin will be available for free-of-charge use after testing and preparing documentation.

We develop the plugin to demonstrate how easy it is to integrate any system with PointLoyalty online services and to popularize our product.

In our opinion KonaKart is one of most advanced eCommerce solutions implemented in Java on the market these days.

We already described how to place «Member Console» widget on your Company web site – please see an example.
We also wrote about using our utility for tuning the application appearance (colors, backgrounds, fonts) – see widget design customization.
To make things easier we put our widget with custom design settings on external website as an example – please see it here.
More information on the Member Console you can get on description page.
Once you have questions – consult our support – support@pointloyalty.com.

We have discovered recently an interesting view on advantages of using SaaS software - see article «SaaS v. on-premises Software: Which One is More Green?».
The author claims (with numbers and calculations) that using SaaS solutions in your business help you reduce global energy consumption.
We never thought about this aspect of on-demand computing but we found it encouraging – we do useful things in terms of our global environment protection!