Loyalty and referral programs are two pillars of customer attraction and retention. Therefore, as an eCommerce loyalty and referral program software vendor or gift card software provider, you know how daunting it is for e-retailers to manage their bonus programs without a special solution.
Your software for such programs helps online store owners to create and manage their sales promotions and make them a profitable affair. But for your loyalty and referral program solution or gift card software, it’s important to integrate with various shopping platforms like Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, etc., to provide its core functionality to the e-retailers and automatically add gift cards to their e-stores.
In this article, we will examine the process of eCommerce integration development and Gift Card API specific features.
Top 5 Main Functions of Loyalty and Referral Program Software
Following are the key functions of any high-quality loyalty program software:
- Customize rewards for the customers
- Accessibility on all the channels
- Integration with other systems
- Providing insightful analytics and reports
- Automatic adding of gift cards to the store
A loyalty program software must be able to prepare customized rewards for every store customer. Therefore, it should look into the consumer buying behavior, purchases, interaction, and most importantly, the purpose of the eCommerce business.
Since customers use any of the three — desktop, mobile, or in-store experiences for shopping, loyalty program software should be able to track their actions on each of these channels. Moreover, the customers will also access the rewards of loyalty and referral programs via one of these channels, the software must provide a seamless user experience on all of them.
The loyalty program software must be able to integrate with other systems to allow retailers to gain maximum advantage from the software. Some important solutions for integration include CRM, CMS, social media, eCommerce platforms, etc. With integration, the software will be able to track consumer behavior via every legacy system present in the company.
Analytics is an essential aspect of loyalty and referral program software. It must provide insights into customers' responses to various loyalty and referral programs offered by e-retailers. In addition, the software should also look into the web activity of the visitors/customers to make retailers understand what type of loyalty programs will be beneficial and most accepted by the customers.
Another critical feature of loyalty program software is automatically adding gift cards to e-stores. It means that the software must be able to get data from online stores about their customers, orders, and everything in between to prepare gift cards and add them to the store. It requires the use of a Gift Cards API.
Importance of eCommerce Integration for Loyalty Program Software
As mentioned before, eCommerce loyalty and referral program software vendors need to integrate their solutions with eCommerce platforms to access online store data. The data related to customers, orders, products, and their interaction and behavior will allow the software to perform all the functions mentioned earlier for the online store owners.
Further, to add gift cards to the online stores, the software vendors will need a Gift Card API to connect with eCommerce platforms and get store data. Not only adding gift cards, but all the features of a loyalty program software require information about customers, their orders, how they spent their time on the e-stores, their purchase history, etc. The software uses this information to:
- create customized loyalty rewards for the e-store customers
- help retailers gain insights into their customers’ likes and dislikes and accordingly design their loyalty programs for the future
- make e-retailers gain more customers and retain them
Further, with the help of Gift Cards API, the software can add coupons and gift cards to the store, deliver the right promotions to the online stores for their customers, launch and manage the referral programs effectively, and make detailed reports for the e-store clients to analyze the performance of their loyalty and referral programs.
To perform all the functions and establish a seamless integration, you need a unified API that can connect your loyalty program software with multiple eCommerce platforms at once. One such API is API2Cart. With its features and functionalities, you can leverage the many benefits offered by integration and do not have to waste all the time, money, and resources on integration itself.
The Process of Adding Gift Cards to e-Stores via API2Cart
API2Cart functions as an integration intermediary between your loyalty program software and eCommerce platforms. When you connect with API2Cart, it can integrate your software to more than 40 eCommerce platforms of your choice and retrieve and manage data from them.
API2Cart has 100+ API methods that enable modifying and working with data on orders, products, e-store clients, etc.
With API2Cart, loyalty software can easily add gift cards to the store automatically. To work with gift cards it is necessary to use such API methods:
- cart.giftcard.list - This method makes it possible to get the list of gift cards in the store. Its response structure may look like this:
- cart.giftcard.add - This method allows adding gift cards to the store.
{
"return_code": int,
"return_message": string,
"gift_card": [
{
"id": string,
"code": string,
"name": string,
"currency_code": string,
"amount": decimal,
"initial_amount": decimal,
"status": string,
"created_at": string,
"avail_to": string,
"free_product_ids": string,
"message": string,
"owner_email": string,
"recipient_email": string,
"owner_name": string,
"recipient_name": string,
"usage_history":[ array
{
"order_id": string,
"amount": decimal
},
...
]
},
...
]
You need to register your free API2Cart account to test these API methods. Moreover, you can try all API2Cart functionality for free for a month.
Conclusion
No matter how advanced and functional your loyalty program software is, without integration with eCommerce platforms, it will not be able to provide its core functionality to the e-retailers. As a result, they will switch to your competitors because they are already leveraging the benefits of multiple integrations. So, it’s better you understand its importance beforehand and use a gift card API to streamline adding gift cards to the e-stores. Or you can contact us to know more about how API2Cart can help you with eCommerce integration and automatically add gift cards to your clients’ online stores.
