In the ever-changing world of digital and mobile gifting, it can be difficult for merchants to meet the demands of their customers. Often, the necessary IT infrastructure and technical support is unavailable. Smaller, independent retailers in particular may be unable to invest in the latest ECR technology, or justify integration with processing platforms, that enable the redemption of mobile and digital gift cards. These merchants however, may be missing customers who wish to redeem such cards at their local store. To solve this problem, Ogloba have introduced Smart Redeem, a new feature of the mobile gift card (mGC) app.
How Smart Redeem works
Smart Redeem allows the redemption to take place without the merchant ECR needing to be integrated with the Ogloba gift card management platform. Instead, the customer and merchant follow a short series of steps to initiate the transaction on the customer’s smartphone.
First, the customer selects the card they wish to fully, or partially redeem, and from the options menu, chooses “Smart Redeem”. The cashier/merchant then enters the amount the customer wishes to redeem, and their own Cashier ID number. The customer must then approve the amount to be redeemed to ensure the correct amount has been entered. Once the customer has approved the transaction amount, a unique authorisation stamp (typically 16 digits in length), which acts as a transaction reference number, is generated.
There are three basic requirements for the retailer to be able to avail of the Smart Redeem feature. Firstly, the retailer sets up a new payment mean on the cash register, “pay by Ogloba”, which allows the gift cards to be redeemed. Secondly, the retailer exports a list, either of unique cashier IDs, or store IDs (MIDs), to allow the transactions to be processed and authorised. Finally, there needs to be the means for the cashier to scan, key in, or even write down the authorisation stamp/code generated to identify each transaction. Once these requirements have been met, the retailer is free to process mobile gift card transactions.
At the end of the business day, the gift card aggregator sends payment to the retailer. As the cards are stored on the Ogloba database, and transactions are processed via the Ogloba servers, security and accuracy are assured. Periodic reports are available for reference and accounting, facilitating management.
