Can Rewards Turn Deal-Chasers Into Loyal Customers?

These days it’s often not enough to offer customers quality products and services at a fair price. Increasingly, consumers expect restaurants, retailers and eCommerce websites to reward them for their patronage, whether through special deals and promotions or a loyalty program. 

While gifts and rewards may seem relatively simple to implement, there is a lot that goes into those transactions, from making sure franchises can accept the rewards to ensuring the funds arrive safely to the intended destination.

In this edition of the Payments as a Service Tracker™, PYMNTS caught up with Donna Novitsky, co-founder and CEO of Yiftee, a company dedicated to digital gift card and rewards, to discuss how merchants can turn gift and reward purchases into profitable transactions and bargain hunters into loyal customers.

Here’s a preview:

Novitsky added that making those transactions lead to loyal, return shoppers, rather than just one-time bargain hunters, can be a challenge, due in large part to the wide range of payment technologies currently in use today.

“It’s a tall order because payments systems are all over the map,” she noted. “Sometimes we find that even one merchant will be a chain or a franchise and have hundreds of different POS systems. The challenge for us is how do we find something that works on all of them because many of them do not have IT staff sitting around waiting to do integrations with whatever particular payment system they have.”

Novitsky said she and her team set out to design the company “to be very nimble on the back end,” which meant there would be plenty of partnerships, primarily with POS providers.

Partnerships with POS providers enable merchants that use those POS systems to accept the digital gift cards seamlessly. According to Novitsky, merchants can accept digital gifts from Yiftee in the same way they would use gift cards from their POS providers.

Around the full-service payments world

Shoppers around the globe are turning to their digital devices to make everyday tasks simpler. For merchants, the devices are also becoming increasingly crucial for how they accept payments for goods and services, integrate with other features, such as analytics and security layers, and connect with their customers. In recent news in the space, full-service payment providers looked to new markets in order to expand their customer base and capture as much of the global full-service payments market as possible.

For example, Moneris rolled out a new currency conversion solution, designed to help Canadian retailers deal with a recent surge in foreign spending. The solution will accept Mastercard or Visa from any country and display the purchase price in both Canadian dollars and the customers’ home currencies.

Alpha Payments Cloud, meanwhile, announced it would open for business in Australia, naming Timmy Alassad the company’s Head of Business for Australia.

In Europe, Dutch Bank ING teamed up with Belgian bank KBC for an integrated loyalty and mobile rewards platform that will be accepted by more than 6,500 Belgian retailers.

Ingenico Group and ADVAM also teamed up, announcing a new agreement that will combine ADVAM’s payment gateway with Ingenico’s iSelf payment devices in Europe and Australia. 

The July Payments as a Service Tracker™ features the latest news and analysis from across the Payments as a Service industry. It also contains profiles of 49 players, including 10 new provider profiles, that not only enable payment processing of new and old technologies, but also integrate with other features that make the merchant’s experience easier.

To download the July edition of the Payments as a Service Tracker™, click the button below.

About the Tracker

The PYMNTS.com Payments as a Service Tracker™, in collaboration with Cayan, is designed to give an overview of the trends and activities of merchant platforms that not only enable payment processing of new and old technologies, but also integrate with other features to improve the merchant’s experience, including customer engagement, security, omnichannel retail experience, analytics, inventory management, software and hardware management, and more.