Glossary

To access the JSON API, you need API credentials, being an API Key and a matching API Secret. You can manage your API Keys in your brand’s portal. By default an API Key / secret pair can be used to perform any operation within your brand. Clutch will only store your API key, and a ‘hash’ of your secret. Your actual API secret can only be shown once when it is generated in the Clutch Portal. For security reasons, Clutch will not keep a record of the plain-text version of your API secrets.

A page of the member portal that allows customers the ability to check the balance of a Gift/Stored Value Card or Loyalty Card.

Your brand is the highest object in the hierarchy of definitions. You will typically have a single brand, and set up all your store locations, groups of store locations, employees, cards, etc. under this brand. All objects within your brand belong strictly to that brand and can never be used outside of the brand.

Individual cards are the core object within the Clutch platform. You can use a card number to link customer data with, issue balances on it, or attach third party usernames to it.

One card can hold a multitude of balances, but at most one per value type that is configured for the program to which the card’s card set belongs.

A card always has a unique card number, which is what it’s identified with within the Clutch Platform. In addition, you can assign a custom card number to each card, which can then be used to search matching cards.

Every card can have 0 or more card balances, at most one per value type set up for the program to which the card’s card set belongs.

Card balance can be configured to be expiring, it can be flagged as return-related balance (i.e. store credit) and you can place reservations on it.

A card set is a set of individual cards. If you have 10,000 physical gift cards, this could for instance be one card set. When placing a Card Allocation API method, you can allocate one card from a card set that you have set up.

In itself a card set does not have any configurable options, it mainly acts as a logical grouping of some cards.

Please see Customer Definitions.

A coupon is a one-time use object with a unique code (i.e. coupon ID). The coupon can optionally be restricted to only work with one or more cards and it can optionally be tagged with a set of tags. These tags can be defined both during the initial coupon bulk load process, during coupon allocation or at any point using an API call.

Coupons can be flagged as used or unused manually through API calls, or this process can be automated as part of campaigns. During checkout API calls, you can specify 0..n coupons and in your campaigns you can configure coupons to be a condition or a result. You could for instance specify that you only get a discount of $10.00 if you are using a coupon from coupon set X or you could configure the campaign to allocate a new random coupon from coupon set Y if a customer spends more than $100.00.

Every card can have a primary customer and even an alternate customer associate with it. On each of these customer objects, you can store some basic demographical data. For more information about saving demographical data on a card object, see Updating Card Information. You can also use a limited number of demographical fields from the primary customer object associated with a card to search matching cards. See the Searching Cards section for more information.

In addition to the basic demographical fields that are available, you can also store any custom card data you want on a card, see the Custom card data section for more information.

In the Clutch Portal, you can define a customer segment and run this ‘query’ on your customer base. You could for instance use this to split your customers into a low-value and high-value segment and set up Campaigns intended to migrate your customers from a low-value to a high-value segment.

The core of data a brand wants to collect from their customers. For more information on Customers, click here Customer Definitions.

A page of the member portal that allows customers to manage their email list preferences.

An employee object represents an employee working at one specific location. You can specify an employee on every request and optionally require employees to use a PIN / password to perform any action through the JSON API. See the Employee Identification section for more information.

A page of the member portal that allows customers to enroll in a loyalty program without creating a password(only if they don’t have a member portal). The enrollment fields are dictated by the customer model. A successful enrollment also requires a brand application id as well as a merchant id

An event is any customer action, engagement or response that you’d like to send into the Clutch system (over the API) in order to reward a customer or to collect data about a customer. There are no limitations on the action the event could represent – it can be anything!

An event is defined with the following characteristics:

• Type (ecom, email, SMS, direct mail, in store, feedback, social, milestone, other)
• Name (choose from our suggestions or create your own name)
• Description (optional)
• Category ID (a unique ID used to record this event in the API request)
• Display settings (customer profile page, segment builder, campaign manager)
• Sentiment (positive, neutral, negative)

Under your brand, you can set up any number of store location groups. By default, you will just have one group with all your store locations. However, if your brand has several subdivisions, you can choose to break up your store locations into multiple groups. Per location group, you can set up Clutch Portal logins with restricted access and get reports / statistics about all activity limited to the group’s store locations.

A location represents either a physical brick and mortar store location, a website or anything describing a venue where customers can interact with a Point of Sale device.

Collection of all Clutch hosted mini websites. They are available for brands with minimal customization options.

A program can be used to group one or more card sets, which in turn contain the individual cards. Per program you can configure some settings that you want to apply to all card sets associated with the program.

You can use a program as a logical grouping of multiple card sets that should all follow the same behavior.

A page of the member portal that allows customers to reach out to friends and family members via a templated, non-customizable email template that encourages them to sign up for the loyalty program. Brands can customize the amount that the sender earns as well as what the recipient earns.

A Terminal object represents a Point of Sale device, used to indicate where an API call is originating from. In case of brick and mortar store locations, it would make sense to set up one Terminal object per physical Point of Sale device / cash register. For online environments, you would usually just set up a single Terminal object.

A Terminal object is always tied to one location.

A value type is a description of a type of balance that is available to all cards of all card sets within one program. A value type is defined by its program, balanceType and depending on the balanceType optionally also a balanceCode.

Available balanceTypes are:

• Currency, in which case the balanceCode indicates which currency code the value type refers to
• Custom, in which case the balanceCode indicates which custom balance the value type refers to
• Points, no balanceCode is specified
• Punches, no balanceCode is specified

Per value type, you can configure the maximum balance you want any card to have of this value type and the minimum and maximum issuance and redemptions amounts. You can use this functionality to for instance limits gift cards in a specific program to have at most $100 on them.

You can set up Currency value types with international currency codes, such as USD. If the balanceType is custom, you can build out as many custom value types with custom balanceCodes as you want. You can use these custom value types to maintain balances specific to your brand, perhaps CoffeePoints or LifetimePoints. You can also use custom value types in combination with Campaigns to act as ‘counters’.