BHN & Voucherify: Building a Centralized Promotion Engine

What is a promotion service?

In ecommerce, a promotion service is a service that manages discounts, coupons, referral rewards, loyalty programs, and other offers designed to influence customer behavior. Its primary role is to make it easy for businesses to launch and manage promotional campaigns that drive sales, increase customer engagement, and improve conversion rates. Promotions are a proven way to increase order volume, attract new users, retain existing ones, and drive seasonal or strategic sales spikes.

Learn more: What is promotion marketing?

Why a centralized promotion service is essential for BHN?

At Blackhawk Network, frequent acquisitions meant inheriting multiple platforms – each with its own promotion engine, custom-built features, and unique configurations. This fragmented ecosystem led to duplicated effort, inconsistent capabilities, and high maintenance overhead. As we scaled, it became increasingly clear: managing promotions across diverse product lines (PLs) needed a unified and scalable approach.

A centralized promotion service solves this by acting as a single, flexible engine that addresses the needs of both customers and internal stakeholders across diverse product lines.

For the external (customers), it supports a wide variety of promotion types – such as percentage discounts, flat offers, BOGO deals, tiered pricing, and more. It also handles customer-specific requirements like support for virtual products, value-based promotions, user segmentation, personalized offers, and multi-channel redemption scenarios. This makes it easy to design rich, targeted campaigns that drive conversions and customer loyalty.

For the internal (stakeholders), the service enables deep analytics, real-time performance tracking, campaign budget governance, and streamlined reporting for marketing and finance teams. Whether a team integrates via SDKs or REST APIs, the centralized layer delivers consistent logic, reusable configuration, and scalable governance, ensuring that every platform, partner, or product line stays aligned while reducing operational complexity.

What are the drawbacks of a non-centralized promotion approach?

• Lack of expertise: Each PL had to manage promotions individually without a dedicated expert team. This led to a lack of deep knowledge and slower issue resolutions.
• High setup effort: Each PL has a different promotion engine, requiring unique knowledge per PL, significantly increasing setup time and effort.
• Duplicated development: Innovation was siloed. New feature development and maintenance had to be repeated across multiple engines.
• Bandwidth constraints: PL teams lacked the time and resources to evolve their promotion systems, leading to outdated or missing capabilities compared to industry standards.
• Delayed time to market: Building promotion capabilities from scratch often became costly and time-consuming, causing promotion initiatives to be deprioritized.
• Poor reusability: Capabilities built in one PL could not be leveraged by others easily, making scaling promotions across PLs expensive and inefficient.

These issues highlighted the need for a unified, scalable, and easy-to-integrate promotion solution.

How did we find the right promotion service?

We set out to find a solution that could centralize and streamline promotions across all our product lines.

Our approach involved:

• Market research: Evaluating multiple promotion engines based on critical parameters such as flexibility, scalability, feature set, ease of integration, and cost-effectiveness.‍
• Use case fit: Shortlisting engines based on how well they matched our real-world use cases, including coupons, discounts, redemptions, eligibility checks, and rollback mechanisms.

After careful evaluation, Voucherify emerged as the most fitting choice. It provided:

• Comprehensive promotion management capabilities.
• Easy-to-use SDKs and APIs.
• Support for complex use cases like tiered discounts, referral programs, and loyalty campaigns.
• Strong scalability to meet growing demands.
• High flexibility for customization.

How BHN built a centralized promotion service?

To make promotions capability accessible across all PLs, we built a centralized Promotion Service.

Here’s how the integration was designed:

• Voucherify SDK integration: Our service directly integrates with the Voucherify SDK, which internally communicates with Voucherify’s promotion engine.
• Technology-agnostic design:
  
  For non-Java platforms, we expose REST APIs via the Promotion-Service. These platforms can interact with Voucherify by calling the unified API endpoints for all promotion-related operations.
  
  For Java-based applications, teams can directly integrate with the Promotion-SDK, which internally wraps all API calls and logic. This eliminates the need for additional API integration and simplifies the development process.
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• Unified API layer: We exposed standardized REST APIs for creation, updation, deletion, eligibility checks, redemptions, and rollback operations.
• Security and access control: Implemented authentication and role-based authorization to ensure secure operations across different teams.
• Extensibility: Built hooks to allow adding PL-specific customizations when needed without breaking the core platform.
• Monitoring and alerting: Integrated logging and monitoring to proactively detect and troubleshoot promotion failures.

During implementation, we faced the usual integration hurdles – from understanding edge-case behaviours to managing configuration complexity. However, the Voucherify team provided exceptional support throughout the process:

• Prompt and detailed responses from their technical support team.
• Hands-on involvement from their Product and Account Management teams in prioritizing feature requests and closing gaps identified during onboarding.
• Collaborative roadmap discussions that helped align product capabilities with our vision.

This partnership ensured we could go live on time, with confidence in the system’s scalability and extensibility.

The following sequence diagram illustrates the interaction between the Blackhawk Network Core Promotion Service, Voucherify SDK, and Voucherify Promotion Engine:

What results did BHN achieve with Voucherify?

To ensure a smooth and risk-free transition to the new centralized promotion service, we introduced a shadow mode that can be enabled at various levels — from an entire tenant down to specific products. In this mode, the new service runs in the background, alongside the existing system, without affecting the customer experience. We compare the results from both services to make sure the discounts are consistent. This data is stored internally and compiled into reports, giving us clear insights into accuracy and readiness. Once the new system consistently matches the old one, we can confidently go live with the new solution.

• We integrated with one of our key D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) and DDP (Digital Distribution Partner) partners.
• We met all major promotion use case requirements including complex eligibility checks, flexible redemption flows, and rollback scenarios.
• The time-to-market for promotions drastically reduced.
• Development effort required for PL-specific engines was eliminated.
• Promotion management became far more scalable and resilient.

What's to come?

Looking ahead, we plan to expand this capability even further:

• Broader integration: Onboard more BHN (Blackhawk Network) platforms and other partner systems to use the centralized promotions service.
• Advanced capabilities: Integrate features like dynamic discounts, loyalty points, and gamification campaigns.
• Self-service portal: Build a portal where marketing and business teams can configure promotions without tech intervention.
• Real-time analytics: Implement real-time reporting and analytics for tracking promotion performance and user engagement.
• AI-driven personalization: Explore AI models to deliver personalized promotions based on customer behavior and preferences.
• Global rollout: Scale the solution for international markets with multi-currency and multi-locale support.