PointLoyalty - loyalty programs online

Let’s talk once again on integration simplicity.
After you make yourself familiar with PointLoyalty Manager bonus programs management system (this can take a bit more then 20 minutes) – you will need to decide how to pass the consumer transactions data into the system.
If you need online data processing, your programmers need to pass the data as follows:

ValueBean val1 = new ValueBean();
val1.setName(”sum“);
val1.setNumericValue(3800);

ValueBean val2 = new ValueBean();
val2.setName(”product“);
val2.setNumericValue(”printer“);

ActionBean action = new ActionBean();
action.setMemberId(”customer card for John Doe“);
action.setName(”purchase“);
action.setValues(new ValueBean[] { val1, val2 });

return action;

From this example you can see that
- “John Doe” has made a “purchase” of a “product” named “printer” and spend “sum” of $130.

In your information system there is a record of this purchase, so there should be no problem in passing this data to PointLoyalty Manager.
(Encryption, data protection, local installations of the product are out of this blog entry scope)
Full description of the integration mechanism.

We already mentioned several times that PointLoyalty Manager can be used not only for tracking bonus points in loyalty programs. It can be also used for maintaining various user ratings for internet resources such as social network sites, forums, etc.

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.

What will happen if the internet connection will be lost? This is one of most frequent questions we hear from our customers who are interested in our online product version.
Our answer – nothing bad will happen. It is of course not very good that customer transactions will not be processed immediately but we believe that it is not fatal for the business – the calculations will take place later. When network connection will get restored – transactions need to be sent once again (this moment must be considered during the integration process).
We can see 3 categories of system robustness according associated costs:
- No additional integration – transactions data is getting lost when the there is no connection to internet
- Keep customer transactions and send them once internet connection is restored.
- Allocate backup internet connection channel – absolute robustness.

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.

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.

A little bit of self-promotion
The last news posted in our blog covered the new features of PointLoyalty Manager System.
Development and support of Loyalty program system for bonus calculation as SaaS tool has been and remains the main activity of our Company.
Besides this we always have been and currently continue the development of custom software both in marketing sphere of Loyalty programs and other related spheres.  Our Company has sufficient resources to carry out such tasks.
Thereby, even if currently you do not plan  the implementation of bonus systems in your business, but you like the design and presentation of our PointLoyalty Manager product, it may well be that we are able to  help you  in questions of other type of automation.
For all cooperation questions, please, contact the Commercial Department of the Company -    sales@pointloyalty.com