trying to develop a loyalty system across multiple POS's?

[posquestions]

There is an opportunity for us to deploy gift/loyalty systems in a market where the current trends are paper based.The market is however characterised with multiple POS systems, terminals and payment processing platforms.What would be the best way to go with this? One of the major challenges is to ensure this remains cost effective to the businesses without requiring them to purchase expensive systems or add ons to integrate our solution.

Would it be possible to customise each businesses' POS system and terminals to accept gift/loyalty cards?

 

[azrobert]

I had a similar challenge for the company I work for and we only had 2 different pos systems to deal with. I ended up developing my own system and installed dedicated touch screen terminals running my systems for loyalty and gift card processing. The cost of finding people familiar with multiple pos systems and developing interfaces for each will be very high....
I have since written my own interface for Micros for the gift card part of my program but it took me several years to be able to do it.

I got a quote of around 9000.00 (just for the gift card portion) from a well known Micros programmer to do it for me and I would guess that you will pay about the same for other pos systems.

Most POS vendors are going to have their own loyalty and or gift card programs that they want to sell to their customers and are very reluctant to help with anything that steers business away from them or their partners.

At least for me it was a lot more cost effective to use a separate system.

 

[DrZogg]

I wrote a small one that sits inside the Micros Db tables. Single outlet, works very well, and added some TABs to it as well so you can limit the spending on a table based on the credit / preauth or deposit paid on that. Did it so they are different functions / SIM inquiries based on the same voucher table.

 

[azrobert]

I ended up writing a sim that goes out and contacts my central sql database and gets an auth, we still have to manually tender the gift card payment but this seems to work well. I had to be able to redeem the cards at 8 locations as well as sell the cards on our website so it would have been a nightmare keeping it inside the Micros Db.