USE CASE: Codes repository for affiliate network

Key terms

Affiliate Service Provider - company that helps retailers and brands connect with millions of active customers anytime, anywhere to drive engagement and sales. They do it through web and mobile apps which enable consumers to find digital offers to save money. 

Advertiser - merchant who is issuing the offers through affiliate service.

Customer - user of affiliate service who will redeem an offer exposed on affiliate’s web page or in a mobile app.

Solution

General overview of architecture

The whole solution consists of three elements: Affiliate Service Provider Infrastructure, Voucherify and Advertiser system (online selling app). Communication between Advertisers and affiliate service is done through Voucherify unit – called Project. Every adviser has an access to certain, isolated project and through this workplace, they can upload codes and implement voucher redemption process for verifying codes used by customers. Affiliate Service Provider has full control access to fetch and distribute vouchers received from all advertisers. Moreover, Affiliate Service Provider can review redemptions and publications from all projects but Advertiser is limited just to his own workspace (project).

Voucher generation

Advertiser uses Voucherify UI to generate unique codes which afterward will be published through Affiliate Service app.

They can generate millions of unique codes which are defined by following parameters:

• You can group vouchers in campaigns and categories.
• Depending on your strategy, vouchers can be redeemed only once or multiple times.
• Marketers and developers can activate vouchers at any time.
• Voucher's lifetime is either limited or unlimited.
• We offer four major types of vouchers - discount and gift vouchers. Other campaigns include referral and loyalty campaigns.

Discount voucher - You can choose one of the following types of discounts:

• amount (e.g. $10 off),
• percent (e.g. 20% off),
• new price (e.g. the product costs $9.99)
• unit (e.g. 2 piano lessons).

Gift voucher

• They are like pre-paid gift cards.
• Redeemable once e.g. a fixed-price voucher for 3-hour golf course or redeemable multiple times against any of your product or service on the condition that a positive balance is on the card.
• Amount value to go is associated with the voucher.

Offers presentation

In next step after codes generation, we are ready to expose them to end customers. Affiliate Service Provider platform can access codes through API using private keys for server side integration. Security keys can be taken from Project Settings.

For fetching codes, implement integration with a specific API method. It will give you the possibility to display all codes or grouped by campaign name. In case you want to assign codes to customers identified by email, name, address or some metadata, you can use our publishing method accessible from API. Thanks to this implementation you will get the possibility to track codes distribution. This step is optional.

Moreover, always along with the publish method your app will get a new yet unpublished yet code from a campaign. It can be a useful mechanism in case of unique codes distribution.

Redemption process

The next step is to let customers redeem codes in Advertiser’s store. The easiest way to achieve that is to call Voucherify API in Advertiser backend for redemption, just after the order is made. Thanks to this you will get the monitoring tool for the whole process at one place – Voucherify dashboard.

Advertiser will have to implement redemption process according to their business needs. They get access to two major building blocks from Voucherify API:

• Voucher validation method – which can be used to verify code in both mobile and web app. It gives real-time feedback about the correctness of provided code. This method doesn’t mark voucher as used.
• Voucher redemption method – this step should be correlated to the purchasing event. It marks eventually code as redeemed. By this, we mean that operation increments redemption counter and updates history of the voucher.

Integration with these API blocks gives tangible benefits for both Advertisers and Affiliate Service Provider:

• events and redemption history monitoring,

• customer tracking and segmentation,

• custom validation rules for vouchers/coupons.

Advertisers get a possibility to use one of our SDKs for simplifying a communication through REST methods. Voucherify maintains SDKs for major platforms: Ruby, PHP, Java, NodeJS, JavaScript, Python, Android, iOS (Swift), .NET, Xamarin, Unity.