Most loyalty programs fail for embarrassingly simple reasons: they’re rigid, they don’t integrate, and they can’t keep up with how customers actually shop.
It’s not that loyalty as a concept is broken: points, tiers, perks, referrals, rewards still work. What’s broken is the architecture behind most legacy loyalty tools.
So the companies that rely on loyalty for growth: CPG giants, marketplace ecosystems, fintechs, subscription businesses, and any retailer with an omni-channel identity problem, are quietly moving to something different: a loyalty API.
This post breaks down what a loyalty API really is, when you need one, what it unlocks, and how real brands use one to run multinational, multi-touchpoint programs without adding engineering debt.
A loyalty API is a programmable interface that lets you build and run a loyalty program the same way you build any other core feature in your stack, through structured objects, predictable rules, and clean integrations. Instead of forcing you into a pre-designed loyalty template, a loyalty API gives you core objects such as:
And core operations like:
Once you apply loyalty APIs, you stop hacking loyalty features around your ecommerce or CRM system and start orchestrating loyalty the same way you orchestrate payments, shipping, or identity.
A loyalty API makes the loyalty program:
Legacy loyalty systems, especially the “drag-and-drop” or “set it and forget it” platforms, were built for a different era. They fail in four predictable ways:
But why bother with APIs when you have dozens of SaaS ecommerce solutions out there? As much as web-focused SaaS provide a lot of out-of-the-box value for the regular ecommerce store, their lack of integration capabilities with customer touchpoints, CRM and ecommerce software ecosystem leads to simplistic approach to omni-channel customer journey, suboptimal rewarding schemes, and ineffective offer management in the enterprise context.
Such approach yields mediocre customer engagement and in effect, leads to loss in revenue, market share, and margins.
What is it that makes API-based approach work then? Integrating offers with customer-facing applications and back-end requires a heavy IT investment. If you add organizational scale and complexity many multi-brand companies face, these tasks give your digital teams an uneasy headwind:
3. Multi-national offer management:
Even if you have a substantial team of software engineers available (which isn’t often the case, right?), achieving this level flexibility of your offer management software can take ages.
This is where the headless commerce or API-first approach comes in. It gives your team programmable building blocks that make business logic development faster, but you still:
In a nutshell, it takes out the cons of both rigid eCommerce platforms and the legacy in-house promotions implementations, making promotion and loyalty campaigns management easier for everyone.
Learn more: Explore Voucherify's Open Source Loyalty Accelerator
Let’s take a look at some common challenges for a top multinational consumer goods company and how headless approach helps them bridge the technology gap as compared to cookie-cutter SaaS loyalty management solutions. This is how they summarize API-first (in this case Voucherify) advantages:
As an API-first solution, anything that can be done in the administration panel can be automated for the purpose of multiple markets scenarios. In the same vein, the data synchronization endpoints from API make loyalty programs easier to manage and maintain globally. Batch exports, on the other hand, are found useful for integration with business intelligence solutions.
Data integrity is essential for digital teams to navigate loyalty strategies across multiple brands and customer touchpoints. API not only supports programmable campaign creation and maintenance, but also automated notifications throughout the whole campaign lifecycle. This is achieved with CRM and product catalog synchronization endpoints, and webhooks triggered by 50+ events. On top of that, native plugins to popular ecommerce (Shopify in our case) and CRM platforms reduce integration time tenfold.
Regular loyalty solutions offer only few dimensions to build an incentive scheme. Our multibrand loyalty program requires more. This is where Voucherify metafield capability comes in. It allows you to create tiers on any customer attribute, reaching outside default dimensions such as purchase history.
Our loyalty program enables customers to earn points for offline purchases which will be tracked with OurCart, receipt data extraction and identification platform. With Voucherify loyalty API endpoints, the digital team can easily make OurCart events accepted by the Voucherify loyalty engine – recognizing local regulations and loyalty strategies.
Voucherify offers a custom location for deployment. This translates into better application response for your customer-facing applications and overall performance of your ecommerce ecosystem. But there’s more, separate deployments enable security- and performance-oriented customization including API throttling or stronger isolation from Voucherify partners.
Voucherify offers a dedicated endpoint for permanent consumer data removal and modification. With this in place, GDPR-related requests can be handled with the same day response time, adding up to your overall customer experience.
In the enterprise context, the speed of integration depends on how quickly software engineers can understand the platform, its features and limitations. Being a developer-friendly solution, Voucherify comes with multiple programming libraries, SDKs, and detailed documentation to make their day-to-day integration tasks easier.
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