The Clutch platform provides developers with the ability to integrate through the JSON API. See documentation here.
This document will guide you through implementing a connection between the JSON API and your point of sale, website, shopping cart or any other service you might want to provide, where customer management, loyalty, and/or gift functionality is being presented to your customer.
Loyalty
The Clutch loyalty engine does all the heavy lifting and computation, enabling your application to focus simply on recording checkouts, retrieving customer account information and redeeming rewards, among other actions.
At a high level, you will record checkouts into the Clutch platform, which will track all customer activity and perform actions specific to each customer, such as issuing rewards and sending notifications. You can choose to have rewards redeemed immediately in the form of calculated discounts, during the next checkout as a discount or you can place your own API calls to redeem balance whenever this fits into your process most optimally.
The business logic responsible for issuing points, giving discounts, etc is defined in Campaigns, which can be configured through the Clutch Portal.
Gift & Stored Value
In addition to loyalty services, the Clutch platform also provides the ability to manage gift, store credit, pre-paid or reloadable card services. You can issue or redeem balance for a customer using the API, as well as search for customers and perform balance inquiries. In addition, you can also reserve balance using ‘holds’ on any amount of card balance and use or release this hold later.
One card can hold any configurable number of balances at the same time. The same card could hold USD balance, but also Points and ‘Coffee Points’ or any custom value type you want to set up.
Tools
There are a number of tools available alongside the JSON API that can help you get started and configure everything for your brand.
- Clutch Portal, allows you to configure almost everything for your brand. New features are continuously being added, but if you find something that you cannot configure through the Portal, our support team will be able to assist you.
- Virtual Terminal, this is a simplified online ‘Point of Sale’ you can use to process transactions.
- Member Portal, depending on your brand setup, we can set up a member portal for you. In the member portal your customers can sign up with their card number and change their own demographics or link up with third parties, for instance linking their Twitter account to a card.
- JSON API, the actual API that you can call to programmatically execute transactions.
- Batch Data Imports are supported via Clutch’s supported formats and processes.
