OST Loyalty 2.0 — The finalization
OST Loyalty is an add-on for the e-commerce software cs-cart (online stores and marketplaces) that creates a customer loyalty program based on OST Simple Token, an easy-to-use side-blockchain for the crypto-currency Ethereum (ETH). It is the result of our participation in the first “hackathon” OST KIT Phase 2. This series will discover our progress for OST KIT Phase 3 to integrate the user wallet into OST Loyalty.
The hackathon OST KIT Phase 3 is successfully completed for OST Loyalty 2.0 now. All requirements were met and OST Loyalty, a tiny little piece of the foundation of OST’s success, is ready to use. You can try it out online, the instructions can be found here.
Links to Github projects:
As we already wrote in our OST Loyalty 2.0 — The halfway look-back, the base idea, a point based customer loyalty program, is an ideal simple use-case for the blockchain, the first used technology for the distributed ledger. Nothing needs to be tested on the market first as it’s a known and commonly applied marketing and customer binding tool, which results in low barriers for the acceptance by “the mainstream”. Everybody is collecting points somewhere: if it’s the supermarket, petrol station or Airline. And OST Simple Token offers for non-tech companies an easy and cheap on-demand access to this distributed ledger technology. It seems to be the natural evolution path for this kind of customer loyalty programs. Exchangeable and with ownership by the users. If properly implemented, it will have a massive adoption potential for blockchain and especially OST, which is still strongly focussed on the financial aspect rather than data aspects.
We will publish an article within the next weeks, how the customer loyalty systems around OST Simple Token should be designed and fit together, as we strongly believe in the power of synergies and standards.
Previous publications on OST Loyalty 2.0 and the OST KIT phase 3 hackathon:
- OST Loyalty 2.0 — Week 1: The Kick-Off
- OST Loyalty 2.0 — Week 2: The foundation
- OST Loyalty 2.0 — The halfway look-back
- OST Loyalty 2.0 — Week 3: The wallet
- OST Loyalty 2.0 — Week 4: The stage
Functional overview
As a short summary, OST Loyalty 2.0 integrates branded tokens (BT) as a point-based customer loyalty program into cs-cart, an e-commerce software. Nothing new, if you read previous articles. In detail, it covers the functionalities, as follows:
- Customer earns BT when they buy something in the shop (configurable)
- Customers can spend BT when they buy something (current fiat value will be used)
- Store owners can create promotions, which are flexibly buildable rules to incentive store users. You can create conditions and incentives, also in combination.
OST KIT API, our wallet-integration and OST View
When we started our journey with OST KIT Phase 2 a few months ago, there was no API library for PHP existing yet. So we decided at that time to create such a wrapper (with code-autocompletion support), which is now published on Github. It contains all so far existing endpoints for OST in v0 and v1 of the KIT API.
For the implementation of OST Loyalty 2.0 we used most of the offered API endpoints (you can check the API documentation for more information):
/actionsto create needed actions for OST Loyalty (e.g. Registration-Bonus, Sales-Volume-Reward, Pay-with-tokens, …) if they do not exist yet/usersto create and retrieve user data/transactionsto execute created actions/balancesto get the balance of a user/ledgerto retrieve transactions of a user/tokento get all branded token data like the companies wallet, current exchange rate, …
The other two endpoints /airdrops and /transfers were not needed yet.
As already mention in OST Loyalty 2.0 — Week 3: The wallet, we had to store some additional information like the used actions, exact exchange-rates at the time of transaction and some referenced object ids (like order-ids) in the centralized e-commerce database. This allowed us to generate a transaction history with more meaningful information for the customer wallets:
Customer can then easily check the transactions and their wallets on OST View, the blockchain explorer for the OST Simple Token side-chain.
Store owner can track API calls in their backend, if they enabled the logger in the logging-settings:
The add-on is also available on the cs-cart marketplace here.
Final words
Tobias had fun but also tough weeks, especially at the end of the hackathons as there were tight deadlines. There were ups- and downs, but most downs came from the effort to implement the API properly in CS-Cart, as this is sometimes tricky because of either too much or too less “flexibility”. Occurring issues related to the OST KIT API could be worked around or were fixed in the new version v1. In our upcoming article about customer loyalty programs on OST, we will have a deeper look on further improvements of the OST KIT.
Fortunately the OST Developer channel and their support (support@ost.com) is always a great help with a direct contact to the OST Team or to even get help from other developers, hanging around there.
Thanks to all contributors, supporter, helping heads and the OST Team! Great idea — fantastic work!
