The general report on the development of PoitnLoyalty Manager system of client loyalty record

Posted on September 11, 2009 by admin

REST / Web services
1) SSL support for REST API.
2)  the methods of creation of loyalty program users’ accounts have been added.
Now the owners of loyalty programs may:
- provide their users with logins/passwords — offline business.
- create accounts automatically – online business.
User console (the system of notification of loyalty programs users)
1) It is given the example of user console placement on the site of an owner of the program.

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.

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Member Console integration (continued)

Posted on August 13, 2009 by admin

In our previous post we described how to integrate “Member Console” with your web application. There is one more option for better integration – JavaScript callbacks. Following callbacks are invoked by the Member Console:
- onLoad (no parameters)
- onLogin (no parameters)
- onLogout (no parameters)
- onError (optional parameter – error reason)
- onLoginError (optional parameter – error reason)

On any integration issue please contact – support@pointloyalty.com

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Member Console integration

Posted on August 11, 2009 by admin

How to place Member Console directly on your website? Simple javascript example is described in «Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script» article.

Here is a code sample:

<html>
<script
type="text/javascript"
src="http://blog.deconcept.com/swfobject/swfobject_source.js">
</script>

<div id="flashcontent">
This text is replaced by the Flash movie.
</div>


<script type="text/javascript">
var so =
new SWFObject(
"http://www.pointloyalty.ru/forms/member.swf?client-image=test&demo=true",
"mymovie", "1024", "768","8", "#336699");
so.write("flashcontent");
</script>
<html>

You can create HTML file, copy the sample code above and run it locally or on your application server. Pay attention that design issues are not covered in the sample.
To display the data for particular member you need to supply username and password of this member when invoking “Member Console” widget.

“http://www.pointloyalty.com/module/member.swf?name=username?pswd=password“

Posted in Member Console, integration | Tagged | 2 Comments

Identification of your loyalty program members

Posted on August 6, 2009 by admin

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.

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PointLoyalty Member Console interface

Posted on August 3, 2009 by admin

PointLoyalty Manager clients already know how to provide their customers feedback using PointLoyalty Member Console.

From now you can put your company logo on the Member Console form. See “Edit profile” form in PointLoyalty Manager application.

You can put a link to the Member Console directly on your web site. This way your company will get the system of loyalty program member’s notifications without any spending on integration. This is a very easy way to inform your customers about new loyalty programs, earned bonus points and their purchase record.

This innovation is another step to simplify the process of integration PointLoyalty with your web applications.

Please pay attention that you can allow your customers to register in the Member Console by themselves and you fully automate this process using new online integration options.

See also:
Member accounts data

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Education Center

Posted on July 28, 2009 by admin

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.

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Non-standard use of PointLoyalty bonus processing system

Posted on July 20, 2009 by admin

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.

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PointLoyalty. SaaS loyalty programs supoprt system.

Posted on July 16, 2009 by admin

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)

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Consulting on PointLoyalty Manager bonus processing system

Posted on July 13, 2009 by admin

- 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.

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Rewarding online shop customers

Posted on July 2, 2009 by admin

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.

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