Integration Guide

Learn how to integrate Voucherify step-by-step.

Aligning goals

Even though Voucherify is 100% ready to be used by professionals who want to try the tool independently (you can sign up, integrate the API, and roll out your first campaigns within an hour), we are strong proponents of initial matchmaking parties. Sitting down at the table together allows the Voucherify team to listen to your business needs and help you find the path to evaluate a solution. Thousands of consultative calls helped us coin this 3-step process:

1. Introduction call – a 1-to-1 demo meeting that will help our team be prepared and convey a level of confidence with your team from the start of the project.

2. Establishing Success Goals – having gained knowledge about Voucherify, it’s time for your team to write down the before/after analysis for your digital promotions strategy. Here are some questions you might want to consider:

How will Voucherify functionalities drive results and whether they will affect the bottom line?
What functionalities can we not live without?
What would the ideal results be?
Can we afford to reallocate the funding and resources?
How much time and resources are reasonable for integrating Voucherify?
Will Voucherify support long-term digital initiatives?
Can we save time and resources in the long run?

3. Sales to services handoff – assuming that we gained your trust, we can move to the implementation part to get your promotions to the next level. Our experience shows that the most common, recurring predictor of implementation success is strong project governance. And this starts with establishing a Voucherify Customers Success Specialist (CSS) who will:

Drive alignment across all teams with weekly status meetings.
Provide expertise where required and bring a singular focus to every implementation.
Build a relationship with your team to ensure that issues are quickly addressed and the project continues.

Modeling required capabilities

Having communication channels aligned, you should now consider the following steps of the integration process:

Promotion scenarios discovery

A high-level overview of campaigns you should be able to run with Voucherify, including coupons, loyalty programs, referrals, cart-level discounts, gift cards, and giveaways. As the campaigns vary, their setup follows a different flow. That is why we have prepared specific webinars and guides on each type of campaign:

You can start with a single campaign type and expand to other campaigns later. Thanks to our modular built, you can pick and choose which building blocks you need at the moment. This way you can start small, learn the tool and run bigger projects later, without large upfront costs.

Redemption touchpoints

A deep dive into your customer journey and the technology supporting it to find out how to apply Voucherify promotions to your e-commerce and CRM software. To enable customers to redeem codes, your website/app/store needs to be connected to your Voucherify account. This integration guarantees that the app will recognize promo codes used by your customers so that they can be validated and redeemed.

Here are the possible ways of redeeming codes after syncing with Voucherify:

Redemptions with API integration (highly recommended).
Redemptions with an embedded widget or via a landing page.
Redemptions with Magento, BigCommerce, Shopify, and WooCommerce plugins.
Offline redemptions with a free Voucherify mobile app (scanning QR code).
Manual redemption via the Dashboard.

Voucherify supports the redemption of both single and multiple redeemables. If you are interested in allowing multiple redeemables in a single request (stacking discounts), please check our Stacking Discounts API (open beta).

Users, roles & budgets

Mapping how various departments such as marketing, customer support, and engineering can collaborate to create and maintain successful campaigns. Voucherify does not place limits on the number of users within the account (with the exception of a free plan). In Voucherify, there is always one Admin (the account owner) who can assign roles to team members and restrict their rights.

Customer data

An analysis of which customer attributes should feed the Voucherify personalization engine and how frequently to synchronize them to get the promotion timing right. With Voucherify, you can collect, update, store, and export customer data. By integrating your customer database with Voucherify, you get to build customer-specific promotion rules, dynamically segment customers, and better report on the campaign performance.

If you want to keep your customer database in sync with Voucherify, you should create and update a customer profile every time a new customer record is created or updated on your side. API and webhooks are a better long-term solution to keep your customer database up to date.

Syncing customer data is optional – you can operate on the customer id as the only unique customer identifier. Voucherify can verify the eligibility of your campaigns based on customer data, including the PII information. However, you dictate if the PII data is needed for the campaign personalization.

Product catalog

A plan on integrating Voucherify with your inventory to enable product-specific discounts and enhance loyalty and referral programs with material rewards. With metadata (custom attributes), you can map any product catalog structure. This way, you can reflect custom products' properties. In effect, every product will get a set of custom fields you can fill in if you decide to import your catalog to Voucherify.

If you import your product catalog to Voucherify, you will be able to:

Use products and variants to build validation rules.
Restrict promotions to apply only to certain products or make them accessible only if the order contains or does not contain certain products.
Create custom earning rules for your loyalty programs that will gratify your customers for certain product purchases more than others.
Build product collections that group products that share the same attributes (standard and custom ones).

Distribution

Re-evaluating customer journey from the perspective of incentive/reward delivery. Voucherify is the only Promotion Engine that is equipped with an integral distribution mechanism. Distribution defines the process of delivering a code/promotion to a customer. It comes down to choosing a delivery channel, designing a message template, and defining a trigger to send a notification.

Using Voucherify Distribution is optional. If you already have different communication tools in place, you can integrate them with Voucherify API or use some of the pre-built messaging integrations ( Braze, MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, SendGrid, and more).

Reporting and system integration

An overview of Voucherify data export capabilities for business intelligence and data integrity purposes. Voucherify gives you a wide variety of channels and tools that keep you informed about campaigns' performance, ROI, and budget spent in real-time. Voucherify also allows you to track the order and redemption history of a particular customer and access a 360-degree customer profile view.

Tracking the performance of your campaigns is crucial to meet the expectations of your customers and secure your budget. Voucherify tracks successful and failed redemptions and allows you to analyze them from different points of view – global, per campaign, per customer, per time period, and more.

If you want to use external BI tools, you can send Voucherify data to your systems via webhooks, manual export, or request them via API.

Migrations from legacy systems

Planning how to transition your legacy campaigns without causing harm to the shopping experience. Whether you need to migrate old data from an internal promotion tool or switch between providers, Voucherify is ready to support you. Voucherify has plenty of CRM-related options, which means that you can securely store and operate on data to inform your promotional strategy. You can migrate the following data entities:

Customer information
Product & SKU information
Voucher codes (discount coupons, loyalty cards, gift cards)
Custom events
Metadata (custom attributes)

Defining custom attributes (metadata) and events

Custom attributes that are not built-in Voucherify can be added to your Voucherify project as metadata. Metadata attribute is a set of key/value pairs that you can use to customize your campaigns. After defining custom attributes you will need in the campaigns, you can pass them to Voucherify API and validate incentives against custom rules, e.g., only customers with the CLV of 50 or higher can claim the offer.

Similar to metadata, you can use custom events to pass custom actions to Voucherify and build promotion conditions based on the event itself, as well as its recency or frequency. For instance, only customers who leave a review get 100 bonus loyalty points.

Data volume estimation

Depending on the traffic and data volume, the integration might require additional activities like setting up a dedicated cluster or splitting your promotional campaigns into several Voucherify projects.

Security requirements

We consider several security-sensitive inputs like PII data policy, GDPR requirements, history of fraud incidents, and organization access policy to design and set up a secure Voucherify account compliant with international standards and keep your campaigns protected from malicious activity.

Go here to learn more about how Voucherify protects your account and campaigns.

The above steps serve as input for the design phase carried out by our team. Depending on the complexity, this process usually takes several days. Once it’s complete, we send you an integration plan and invite you for an architecture review meeting. This is an essential toll gate required to take place before the implementation begins.

At the meeting, the Voucherify solution architect presents the integration blueprint and data model, demonstrates our recommendations according to your requirements, and identifies any remaining open issues.

Setting up account

When your team accepts the integration plan, we head off to account configuration. Upon its completion, CSS will notify your team with a short note on how to access your Voucherify account and invite users from your team.

Marketing and customer teams can use our how-to guides and webinars to explore the dashboard. If anything is unclear, you can request an online walkthrough carried out by one of our CSS.

Developing the integration

Once your account is set up, you can let your developers begin the API integration. Our API is flexible, and thanks to extensive documentation, easy to integrate with other software. It is organized around REST. We made sure to make our documentation as clear as possible to give your engineering team an edge. There are several building blocks they can use to get the job done faster:

Detailed API endpoints reference.
Libraries for every popular programing language.
Step-by-step guides.
Pre-built UI widgets.
Testing environment.
Slack community chat.

SDKs:

There are two ways of connecting to Voucherify API:

Client-side – the action takes place on the user’s website or mobile application. It is faster to integrate because you only need to include voucherify.js or iOS/Android library respectively. Your developers can call requests directly from the app code. Some functionalities might be limited due to security reasons in this setup.
Backend-side (server-side) – the action takes place on a web server. It is longer to integrate than the client-side API, however, it offers full API functionality. It requires a secured middleware that will load data from Voucherify and push it forward to the app.

Voucherify offers separate API keys for client-side methods which you can find and reset (if needed) in the Project Settings. You can therefore safely use the limited set of endpoints directly in the web/app code. As an extra security measure, Voucherify can limit the client-side calls only to those coming from specific URLs.

The main features that make Voucherify API easy to use:

It has predictable, resource-oriented URLs.
It uses HTTP response codes to indicate API errors.
We use built-in HTTP features, like HTTP authentication and HTTP verbs, understood by off-the-shelf HTTP clients.
We support cross-origin resource sharing, allowing you to interact securely with our API from a client-side web application.
JSON is returned by all API responses, including errors, although our API libraries convert responses to appropriate language-specific objects.
We offer a Sandbox project and a test store where you can see how your incentives behave and see API requests and responses sent to Voucherify.

Validating the setup

After Voucherify starts accepting your API request and the redemption endpoint is embedded into your checkout pages, you might want to battle-test your promotion scenarios. At this stage, it’s useful to run through the following test suite:

Dry-run of planned promotion customer journeys (e.g., coupon creation, publication, validation, redemption, and rollback).
Test validation rules against corner cases (a wrong condition can burn your promotion budget in no time).
Find and fire the most common maintenance features (e.g., filtering campaigns, browsing single customer view, activating/deactivating campaigns, searching for coupon code).
Verify that customer attributes synchronization works as expected (e.g., creating a dynamic segment based on specific customer attributes).
Test corner cases to see how error handling works for end customers (e.g., test the message your customers see when a coupon validation fails).
Verify if all users can access the dashboard and enter specific projects and views according to the role-based policy.
Browse audit logs to understand how Voucherify monitors user activity.
Go through redemption history and other statistics to learn how you can be informed about campaigns’ effectiveness.
Configure and test webhooks to see if Voucherify notifies external systems about pre-defined promotion activities.

The ultimate test of your setup will be the migration of your promotions from the legacy system to Voucherify. You don’t need to decide on a hard switch, though. Voucherify API flexibility allows your team to bulk import the promotions programmatically, connect them to customer touchpoints, and handle your promotions in parallel.

Deployment

Before you switch to Voucherify, there’s one more thing that needs to be done. Your team needs to learn how to navigate the dashboard. Although Voucherify is a versatile tool, the overarching concept of each promotion campaign follows the same steps: create, distribute, validate, and track.

Finally, when all controls turn green, you can switch to Voucherify and let us take care of promotions' effectiveness and security. Now the hard part starts – you need to run your first promotion campaign and figure out what works and why. Here’s how we help you with at this stage:

Our CSS sets up a regular account health review and will notify your team about possible mistakes or low-hanging improvements.
A product newsletter that shows how Voucherify’s improvements help you save time.
With the Sandbox project, you can test new promo scenarios and marketing channels without disrupting your production setup.
In our Community Chat, you can talk to like-minded teams to explore how forward-thinking companies run promotional campaigns.

Implementation time

The quick integration time is something Voucherify has been built in mind with. The concept of "headless" refers to the decoupling of the frontend of an application or the user interface that the end-user interacts with, and the backend, or the engine of the application that processes all the business logic. When organizations embrace a headless approach in the promotion space, it means they're leveraging a back-end promotion engine that doesn't come with a front-end UI or predefined promotion delivery channels. Instead, they build their own customer touchpoints that consumers use to interact with your campaigns.

While Vouchefiy provides several building blocks to power up the whole promotional strategy, the best thing about the headless approach is that you can do it in baby steps. Improving one area at a time helps you to go faster and save the budget. Nevertheless, there are still a few key considerations that influence integration time:

Access to developers – you will need developers to integrate Voucherify with customer touchpoints and CRM systems.
Requirements – if you aspire to deliver a unique promotion experience, then you need to analyze which data sources should be synchronized into Voucherify and how to implement it.
Future changes – while you might start small, with a single campaign type, but you already know you’ll employ other building blocks like referrals, cart-level discounts, or loyalty programs in the future, it’s recommended to increase your planning session before you connect to our API. This way, you can save yourself redundant work of setting up the schema and flow of data again.

In general, the more campaign types, customer touchpoints, and 3rd party systems you want to integrate Voucherify with, the more developer effort is required. On the bright side, this doesn’t grow linearly – once you have Voucherify on board, adding new campaign types takes less and less time.

Integration time benchmarks:

Lean startups – a day or two, our record is one hour for the front-end and one hour for the back-end to accept coupon redemptions in the production environment.
SMEs – on average, a week to launch the first campaign, a couple of weeks for more advanced scenarios.
Enterprises with many dependencies – from a couple of weeks to several months, including securing the development team, going through security checks, and onboarding the marketing team.

Best practices

Involve your software team early on in the design process. Make sure they read the API integration guide to evaluate the necessary workload.
If you find it difficult to estimate the traffic and select a respective Enterprise pricing tier, we recommend starting with a Professional plan and upgrading as you grow. If you need dedicated support from day one, we should talk about the Enterprise plan straight away.
To spin off a proof of concept to test the whole customer journey, you can use our pre-built UI widgets.
Using official SDKs reduces the number of integration issues and the total implementation time.
Every object you interact with via API stores an HTTP request/response body. Use them to debug your integration and solve issues raised by your team.

If your business needs assistance developing promotional solutions with Voucherify, get in touch with our Solution Partners. Our Partners are experienced digital agencies trained in using Voucherify potential to the fullest.

Integrating with other tools

Voucherify offers plenty of built-in integrations that connect your existing toolkit with promo campaigns in a couple of clicks. As a result, you can plug Voucherify and promo codes into every stage of your sales funnel in no time.

Front-end

Voucherify is responsible for the back-end logic and maintenance of digital promotions. Following the headless approach, we believe in the separation of the back-end from the front-end. This way you make the integration faster, have total control over the final look of your offers and minimize the risk that a back-end error will cause disruption to your front-end applications.

Besides API endpoints that can display data on your own front-end, Voucherify offers the following features to make front-end implementation of your campaigns easier:

Need help with implementation? Contact us to discuss your integration plans, current technology stack, desired timeline, and any special requirements you have. We will analyze your needs and prepare an individual offer for the implementation cost and timeline.