Developing Sylius and Sylius Plus is a never-ending process that we really enjoy. To show you what we have been up to recently, we decided to create a series of technical blog posts to explain our Roadmap a little and to present the most interesting features of our product. This time let’s take a look at Sylius Plus and our new apple of the eye – the Sylius Plus Loyalty System.
While designing Sylius Plus Loyalty System, we tried to cover as many Administrator and Customer scenarios as possible. We made a deep research and decided to choose 5 main features that will create the foundation of the feature, and will be easy to grow in the future.
Building this account was definitely the first step for the whole Sylius team in creating the Sylius Plus Loyalty System. Being logged in as a Customer, you can check your loyalty points balance in the My Account section. Thanks to this feature now Sylius Plus has a points counter, an index of transactions made using Customer’s loyalty points and a section for browsing the history of points transactions of a Customer as an Admin, this all enhances the user experience and facilitates customer service when something about loyalty points becomes unclear to your customers.
As the Admin, now you will be able to configure a loyalty rule that lets Customers collect points by placing orders. For example: “Add X points to the Customer’s points wallet for every Y$ spent on products from chosen categories” 1 point for every 2$ spent on t-shirts or 1 point for every 3$. We are thinking about making them current or not (like exclusiveness of promotions in Sylius). Let us know what your expectations are in that area.
Collecting points is important, but your Customers need to know what for are they doing this. Loyalty systems propose an exchange of points to specified benefits for the Customer, this can be discount codes, free products, free shipping and many other special offers. In the first version of Sylius Plus Loyalty System he Admin configures an object (so-called “Loyalty Purchase”) that is visible for Customers in the shop and to get it they can spend their loyalty points (example: spend X points to get a $5 discount or 10% order discount). How does it exactly look from the Administration Panel’s side? We added a new section “Marketing > Loyalty Purchases” in the administration panel. In this section, Administrators will be able to create objects which then will be visible for the customers to exchange their points to. This object will contain a price in loyalty points and a promotion configuration (coupon based, with rules and actions) to which it will generate a coupon code as a result of the exchange. As you can see the Loyalty System is conveniently based on the Sylius Promotions engine, this lets you understand how it works much quicker, and gives you unlimited options to configure.
As a Customer, now you will be able to exchange your points to discount coupon codes that you will receive via email. In the “Loyalty” section or in a dedicated section in the shop, the Customer can see a list with coupon codes available to “purchase” with Customer’s loyalty points (exchange a given amount of points to a coupon code e.g. 5$ discount for 200 points), these are the “Loyalty Purchases” configured by the Administrator. The coupon code after the purchase will be emailed to the customer (MVP). In further development we are planning a collection of Customer’s purchased coupons in the “My Account > Loyalty” section.
As a Customer, you can use a coupon code you have generated using your points. If you’re thinking now “well, this is nothing new”, you’re right(ish). This is already available in Sylius and is based on the promotions engine. In Sylius Plus Loyalty System the Administrators will be able to configure the promotions coupons to be usable only once and to expire after some time, just as flexible as usual promotions. Also, in the order summary page, just before completing the order, as the Customer you will be able to see how many loyalty points you’ll earn in this order based on the loyalty rules configured by admin.
Implementation of every eCommerce Loyalty System will help you in engaging your Customers in buying more and more frequently. It’s not rocket science to know that the easy-to-understand programs are the key here. We did everything we could to create the Sylius Plus Loyalty Program as simple and useful as possible. Let us know what you think. We’re waiting for your feedback.
