bLoyal Release Highlights

We’re thrilled to announce the bLoyal 2024-R1 product release. This update is part of our ongoing efforts to refine our real-time omnichannel platform, bringing you superior features and capabilities across different areas of the platform.

The release contains important new features and serves as a cumulative hotfix, addressing issues reported over the last several months through bLoyal Support requests. The key enhancements included are:

bloyal release highlights

Web Snippets

All our Web Snippets have been upgraded to the latest React Framework, offering a fresh, user-friendly interface optimized for mobile devices. You can now take advantage of these enhanced Web Snippets:

For Customer Management

  • Customer Details: Manage customer contact addresses.
  • Purchase History: Display global purchase history, including in-store, subscriptions, and online transactions directly on your website.
  • Login: Use bLoyal to authenticate a content management system if you don’t use one of the integrated Ecommerce platforms (WooCommerce, Shopify, or Magento).
  • Account Management: Create a My Account page for any content management system if you don’t use one of the integrated Ecommerce platforms (WooCommerce, Shopify, or Magento).

For Loyalty Program Management

  • Signup: Capture customer information during signup.
  • Dashboard: Provide an online dashboard where customers can keep tabs on their loyalty.
  • Customer Referrals: Establish a Referral Program where customers can easily advocate your brand online and receive rewards.

For Subscriptions and Membership Management

  • Shipping Addresses: Manage single or multiple shipping addresses.
  • Payment Methods: Manage single or multiple stored credit cards.
  • Club Signup: Customers can sign up for a subscription online.
  • Club Preferences: Customers can customize their subscriptions, including a custom start date, frequency, and payment model (up-front or as-you-go).
  • Club List: Customers can manage their subscriptions, including updating, suspending, or closing them directly on your website.

For Gift Card Management

  • Egift Card: Sell digital gift cards or eGift cards online.
  • Balances: Customers can check physical or eGift card balances online.
  • Register: Customers can convert eGift Cards to Loyalty Cards by registering them under their name online.

POS Snippet Updates

We’re currently transitioning all POS Snippets to the new React Framework. This promises a sleeker UI for your team, enhanced touch capabilities, and streamlined workflows, reducing the number of clicks needed to accomplish tasks.

The initial POS Snippets featured in this release are:

  • Quick Signup: Capture new core customer information.
  • Quick Edit: Quickly update core customer information.
  • Apply Coupon: Reduced number of clicks needed to find, apply, or remove coupons in a transaction.
  • POS Alerts: Several POS Alerts can now be configured to alert your team about customers’ information (or lack thereof), promotions, and coupons. You can find more about them here.

We’ll continue to complete the conversion of all remaining POS Snippets and keep you posted as they become available.

Clubs/Subscriptions/Membership Updates

As the “subscription economy” continues to boom, we’ve introduced enhanced features to efficiently handle custom memberships—club processing, automated billing subscriptions, and more.

A notable enhancement comprises the new Club Definition UI based on a workflow wizard to improve the way Clubs are configured, including the following settings:

  • Details: General settings, such as base price, default shipping service, and store.
  • Term: Unlimited term and fixed term memberships based on several months, years, or charges/shipments.
  • Join Settings: Determines where customers can join, such as POS, web, or kiosk, and what Club Sign Up snippet to use.
  • Members Preferences: Provide custom preferences to your Members.
  • Join Awards: The type of Loyalty Awards a customer earns for joining, such as points, loyalty dollars, and coupons.
  • Engagement: Send emails throughout the Membership lifecycle, such as:
    • Expired credit card
    • Problem order
    • Suspended or closed membership
    • Reactivated membership
  • Billing: Configure your program for manual or automated recurring billing.
  • Order Fulfillment: Choose between bLoyal fulfillment or an external system for fulfillment (COMING SOON).

These new capabilities won’t impact any existing club or membership programs.

Supplemental Fees for Shipping and Pickup Orders

At times, there’s a need to charge supplemental fees. A recent example is the California Redemption Value (CRV). If you’re using ShipCompliant or Avalara for tax calculations through bLoyal, we now support the addition of appropriate CRV fees for shipping and pickup orders where applicable, including:

  • A new Product Type called Supplemental Fees
  • Adding CRV fees automatically for Director Orders
  • Adding or removing CRV fees automatically for POS Shipping Orders
  • CRV fees can be automatically added to integrated Ecommerce platforms, such as WooCommerce.

Promotions Updates

We continually expand the capabilities of our Loyalty and Promotions Engine to support new business scenarios and help you grow your customer lifetime value. Features include:

  • New Options for Order Discount Distribution: We now support 3 different ways in which an order-level discount is distributed across line items:
    • Across All Products: This model defaults to distributing the total order-level discount evenly across all line items within the transaction.
    • Across All Products With Exceptions: Choose which products should not be included in order-level discounts. The discount amount will then be spread proportionally across all products not listed as excluded.
    • Across a Selection of Products: Exclusively offer a range of products eligible for order-level discounts. Consequently, the discount will be distributed proportionally among all products not included in the excluded items list.
  • Scope Promotions By Shipping Service: Target products and order promotions to Trigger only when specific shipping services are selected.
  • Ability to select Club Products as a Trigger.

Email Marketing Updates

Changes to email marketing compliance in April 2024 may have affected your marketing emails. As a result, we have expanded our partnership with SendGrid to enable you to comply with these changes and substantially improve our capabilities in creating email templates:

  • Sender authentication, including:
    • Single sender authentication
    • Domain authentication
    • Link branding
  • Many out-of-the-box templates that you can use right away.
  • New WYSIWYG, drag and drop email template editor.
  • Improved mobile optimization.

Avalara Tax Provider

  • bLoyal has now added Avalara as a certified tax service provider integration.

Please feel free to contact us at [email protected] or request a demo with our team if you have any questions or want to take advantage of these new, enhanced features and capabilities of your bLoyal solution.