Your Online Merchant Portal and Reporting

Managing your gift and loyalty program is an important key to the success of your program. To that end we have developed the tools that you need to properly manage your program.

To begin with you will be able to run a daily report directly from your credit card processing equipment or POS system. This report will produce a chronological list of all transactions plus a total count and total dollar amount of all the cards issued and redeemed since the terminal was last settled. You can use this to reconcile your daily deposits in your cash register system.

Then included at no additional cost with all of our programs is your own online Merchant Portal which is where you will be able to view all of your program activity in real-time from any Internet enabled PC or MAC. By simply entering your Location ID, Employee Number and Password you will instantly have access to the most powerful and user friendly reporting tool in the gift and loyalty card industry.

Reports can be filtered by a wide range of demographic information that you can either isolate to a single parameter or in combination with any or all other key data such as expiration (if any), activation, status, balances, name, city, state, zip code, phone, email, birthday, and anniversary as well as your optional choice of 5 additional custom fields. So, for example, if you want to run a report of all of your customers’ birthdays in July along with their email address it is only a matter of a few clicks with your mouse. Maybe you want to run a report of all your customers who live in New York or within a specific zip code – just a few clicks and you’ve got it.

Transaction Reports can also be run from your computer in real-time whenever you need them. We make it easy for you because we already preset buttons that you can click on to run your reports for Today, Yesterday, This Week, Last Week, the Last 7 days, This Month, Last Month, This Year, and Last Year. If your accountant wants to know the details of how many cards are out in the field with balances you simply go to the Liability Reports button, put in the cutoff date, push submit and instantly your Liability Report will populate so that you can print it out.

Finding data about a single card is quick and easy. You can key in the card number or if not available you can do an instant search using any of the demographic information you previously entered for that card member.

For our merchants taking part in the loyalty rewards program the task of entering your Customer Data is a piece of cake. Just go to the Customer form within your Merchant Portal and all the fields are already setup for you to key in the information and then push submit to add new loyalty members.

Your customers will also have the convenience of going online to check their up-to-the-minute balance on their card. That way they will be comfortable in presenting a card at your business knowing exactly what balance remains on the card. This neutrally-branded site can be accessed by cardholders simply by going to https://getyourbalance.com.  They also have the option here to register their card and opt-in to receive marketing messages directly from you as all their personal info such as their mobile phone and Email address goes into your merchant database (not any other merchant’s database). We can provide your webmaster the balance checker code so that they can place a link directly from your website.

Email and SMS Text Messaging

Built right into your Merchant Portal is a button called Marketing where you now have access to two of the most powerful tools in advertising today. There is no form of advertising that is more immediate or affordable than Text Messaging and there is no better way to create a buzz than reaching customers instantly through their mobile phone. At any time of the day you can drive incremental business to your business by sending your customers targeted messages right through your portal. For example, if it is a rainy Wednesday and you are concerned that your restaurant might be half empty then send a special offer to all your reward members that if they come in that evening for dinner then soup or dessert is free. All you need to do is type a short message in the marketing portal, push submit, and within a few seconds all your rewards members will see that message right on their mobile phone’s screen. You can judge the results of your marketing effort that same day unlike newspaper ads and coupon mailings which are very expensive and can take weeks or months to absorb the results. Text messages are only 12 cents each so for just $30 you can instantly reach 250 of your best customers without wasting money on marketing to strangers who may never visit your business.

Similar to text messaging but for zero cost is Email marketing. Also built into the Marketing section of your Merchant Portal is an Email button. Here you just type up an email message once, push submit, and for free your email will instantly be sent to every customer which has provided their Email address. Used for less urgent communication, here you can inform your customers about the new Cadillac that your dealership is scheduled to receive next week, the new line of dresses that your clothing store has just received, the special menu you are preparing for Valentine’s Day, or just to say hello and to wish your best customer’s a Happy New Year.

Free Web Terminal

As an option, we can also set your business up to be able to utilize the free Web Terminal. Taking the place of or used in addition to processing with your credit card terminal or POS system the Web Terminal is a virtual terminal that you can use from any PC or MAC online and accessed with a User Name and Password. Here you can do all the functions normally performed on a physical terminal such as issuing and redeeming gift cards or adding or subtracting points and dollars on a loyalty card as well as printing up daily reports. If yours is the kind of business where face to face sales is not the norm then maybe this is the best option for you.