Gift Card API: Add Gift Cards at Online Stores Automatically

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 create and manage their sales promotions, which become profitable when handled with your help. In order to provide its core functionality to e-retailers, it’s essential to integrate with various shopping platforms like Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, etc., so that your customers can add gift cards to their e-stores automatically.

In this article, we will consider the process of development eCommerce integration development and the peculiarities of gift card API.

5 Main Functions of Loyalty and Referral Program Software

Below are the main functions of any high-quality loyalty program software:

• Customize rewards for the clients

A loyalty program software must offer customized rewards for every store customer. To do this, it must be able to look into the consumer buying behavior, purchases, interaction and most importantly, the purpose of the eCommerce business.

• Available on all channels

Loyalty program software should be accessible across all channels that customers use. These channels include desktop, mobile, and in-store experiences. Moreover, customers can earn rewards from loyalty programs through any one of these channels. Therefore, the software should provide seamless cross-channel experiences for customers.

• Integration with other systems

To gain maximum advantage from the software, it must be able to integrate with other systems. Integrating the loyalty program software with CRM, CMS, social media, eCommerce platforms and other legacy systems will allow retailers to track consumer behavior via every legacy system present in the company.

• Providing deep analysis and reports

Analytics is an essential part of loyalty and referral program software. It can provide insights into customers’ responses to various loyalty and referral programs offered by online retailers. In addition, the software should also look into the web activity of visitors/customers to make retailers understand what type of loyalty program will be beneficial and most accepted by the customers.

• Automatic adding of gift cards

An important feature of loyalty program software is automatically adding gift cards to online stores. To accomplish this, the software needs to be able to get data from the online stores about their customers, orders, and everything in between. Therefore, it requires the use of a gift card API.

Importance of eCommerce Integration for Loyalty Program Software

To access online store data, eCommerce loyalty and referral program software vendors must integrate their solutions with shopping platforms and marketplaces. The information related to customers, orders, products, and their interaction and behavior will enable the software to perform all the functions mentioned earlier for online store owners.

Further, to add gift cards to the online stores, the software vendors will need a gift card API to connect with shopping 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. This information can be used to:

• create customized loyalty rewards for the e-store customers
• make retailers aware of their customers’ likes and dislikes so that they can design more effective loyalty programs in 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 promotions to online stores so that customers receive the right offers at the right time
• launch referral programs to gain more new customers
• make detailed reports available to clients so that they can analyze their performance.

To perform all functions and seamless integration, you need a unified API that can connect loyalty software to multiple eCommerce platforms at once. One such API is API2Cart. With its features and functionality, you can leverage many benefits of integration without spending time, money, and human resources on integration development.

Easy Way of Adding Gift Cards to e-Stores via API2Cart

API2Cart functions as an integration intermediary between your loyalty program software and eCommerce platforms. API2Cart can integrate your software with more than 40 eCommerce platforms of your choice and retrieve and manage data from them.

API2Cart’s 100+ API methods enable you to modify, create, retrieve and manage data on orders, products, e-store clients and more.

With API2Cart, eCommerce loyalty software can automatically add gift cards to the store.

• cart.giftcard.list — this method allows you to get a list of gift cards in the store. The structure of the response may look like this:

{
"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
},
…
]
},
…
]

• cart.giftcard.add — this method lets add gift cards to the store.

You need to register a free API2Cart account to test these and other API methods.

Conclusion

For loyalty programs to maximize the satisfaction of customers and improve your bottom line, the software needs to integrate with eCommerce platforms. This is because, without integration, your clients will switch to your competitors because they are already leveraging the benefits of multiple integrations. Therefore, it is important to understand this need beforehand and use gift card API for streamlining the process of adding gift cards to online stores. You can contact us to learn more about how API2Cart can help you integrate your loyalty program software with eCommerce platforms like Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc. and automatically adding gift cards to your customers’ online stores.