Retty.me from Retty Inc. is the largest online food order and delivery service in Japan having approximately 48 million monthly visitors. It acts as an intermediary between independent takeaway food outlets and customers. Their mission is "Making the world happier, one meal at time."
Retty needed a SaaS solution to quickly roll out their Go To Eat campaign in Japan.
What is the Go To Eat campaign? In short, after the tourism and restaurant industries have been hit hard due to the spread of COVID-19, the Japanese government launched the 'Go To Campaigns' (Go To Travel, Go to Eat) to reignite the demand for these industries. Run by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), the Go To Eat campaign provides vouchers offering up to 25 percent off food and drinks at registered restaurants. There is also a new reward points system for online reservations, which provides gift certificates worth up to ¥1,000 per person. Retty took part in the online booking-related campaign.
That part of the Go To Eat Campaign gives you extra points back when you make reservations at participating restaurants, which you can then use towards your meal the next time you make a reservation at a participating restaurant. For every lunch reservation, you receive 500 yen worth of points per person. For dinner that number goes up to 1,000 yen worth of points per person! The points can be received for each new reservation until the end of January 2021, and they will remain valid until the end of March 2021.
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“The engineer who had an uneasy face when I said "I'm thinking of using Voucherify" was smiling when he saw Voucherify’s documentation.”
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“The biggest problem in participating in this campaign was how to limit the points earning and redemption to be only available at participating restaurants.”
Retty had to limit the points usage, to be available to use only in the Go To Eat campaign – in the participating restaurants, within the time limits of the campaign. They did not have the know-how on the voucher lifecycle: issuing, distributing, validating, redeeming coupons — they knew they would need a SaaS solution.
They have built the Go To Eat campaign using Voucherify loyalty mechanism for points collection. Important features for this campaign were validation rules that helped Retty manage the promotion budget and prevent fraud.
Yuichi was looking for SaaS solutions, but most of them were heavily overpriced. Then, he found Voucherify, whose Enterprise plan was 30-40x cheaper than local and foreign competitors’ plans for the same service level.
Integration and setting up their Voucherify campaigns was very fast. Yuichi and his team did it without even using SDKs, claiming the API documentation was so clear and detailed, that they did not need it.
“We have investigated similar services in Japan and overseas, but there was a price difference of 30 to 40 times for our assumed use.”
Yuichi and his team have used Voucherify to collect customer data, issue, validate and redeem coupons and have set up a server to act as a proxy for communication to Voucherify.
Overall, this is what Retty enjoyed about Voucherify:
We are extremely grateful for this detailed case study from Yuichi Tsunematsu from Retty. This case study was written originally by Yuichi in Japanese, on Retty’s Engineering blog.
