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Loyalty program providers

For a seamless integration experience, Instacart uses loyalty program providers, such as Birdzi and Inmar, to synchronize promotions and discounts while linking customer identity data, such as email address and phone number.

Loyalty program providers offer the following benefits:

  • Offers are configured through external platforms are synced to appear consistently on e-commerce sites.
  • Badges, progress trackers, and custom-created coupon pages enhance promotion visibility.
  • Discounts are applied transparently at checkout, reducing latency by eliminating redundant system checks during shopping.
  • Continuous feature updates are provided without additional setup.

Instacart’s internal discounting platform runs Instacart Marketplace and retailer's Storefront and Storefront Pro sites. Instacart uses the discounting platform to pull in offers from your loyalty program provider and apply them to your e-commerce site, making it easy to display and manage promotions. This integration supports both item-level and basket-level discounts. For information about item-level and basket-level discounts, see Storefront offer types.

Customer accounts are linked to loyalty features through the loyalty program provider or through Instacart single sign-on (SSO). For more information about single sign-on, see Retailer single sign-on.

How loyalty program providers are integrated​

Your Instacart representative sends you an onboarding form to set up loyalty programs for your customers.

You must provide the following items:

  • A loyalty program from a third-party loyalty program provider with an API that can be used to validate the account status.

  • The URL to your existing external loyalty program page, which can be linked from the storefront header.

  • Loyalty program page assets. Provide the following assets and text for display on the loyalty program page:

    Shows a loyalty program with labeled annotations: a back arrow (1), the program title (2 "Loyalty program name"), a section for instructions or value proposition (3), a phone number entry field with country selection (4 and 5), a notice about sharing account details and terms of use (6), a list of program benefits with placeholder text (7, "Benefit description"), and a verification and terms notification at the bottom (8)

  1. Background image
    • Mobile: 1425x402 pixels
    • Desktop: 1000x310 pixels
  2. Icon
    • Mobile: 84x84 pixels
    • Desktop: 110x110 pixels
  3. Name of the loyalty program
  4. Primary text
  5. Field for phone number
  6. Secondary text with up to two hyperlinks
  7. Benefits, each with:
    • Icon: 192x192 pixels
    • Name: Approximately 36 characters
    • Description: Approximately 64 characters
  8. Legal disclosure with up to two hyperlinks

When integrated​

Instacart creates a loyalty account number which you add to your customer’s profile. On the loyalty program page, the customer verifies the account through their phone number. This page makes an API call to the loyalty program provider to validate the account.

note

Only offer types supported by the discounting platform can be mapped and made available to customers. For information on Instacart's supported offers, see Storefront offer types.

The following describes how Instacart manages loyalty during a customer's shopping experience:

  1. Depending on your loyalty program provider, Instacart uses Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) or Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) to pull in offers from your integration to Instacart’s supported offer types in the discounting platform.

  2. When a customer shops, Instacart displays relevant item-level offers. To help customers confirm which offers have been applied, the cart shows the completed item-level offers. If offers are incomplete, a progress tracker helps nudge users to complete them.

  3. Instacart finds all applicable offers through the discounting platform without having to ping the loyalty program provider. This helps improve the customer experience by reducing latency. Instacart evaluates and ingests updates every few hours.

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