How an Australian Retailer Streamlined Their Customer Loyalty Program in Bigcommerce, Vend and Keap
60,000+ customers
30+ daily manual credit updates
10-15 hours saved a week
The Challenge: A Broken Multi-Channel Loyalty Program Flow
For LW, a prominent New Zealand retailer with two physical stores and a successful e-commerce operation, their main challenge is surprisingly simple but critical: their loyalty program data is stuck.
Here's the current situation:
- When a customer makes a purchase in-store through Vend POS, they earn a 5% rebate/store credit
- This store credit information gets trapped in Vend and doesn't automatically sync to:
- BigCommerce (where customers could use it for online purchases)
- Keap (where it could be used for marketing communications like "Hey, you have $10 in credits, want to use it?")
"What is broken is that Vend doesn't talk to store credit at all in BigCommerce. So when somebody in the shop buys, it doesn't go from Vend to Keap... that 5% just sits there." - PG, Owner
The Business Impact
This broken data flow creates several problems:
- Manual Updates Required: Staff must manually enter store credits into BigCommerce
"I've got 30 sitting here this morning" - PG, Owner
- Lost Marketing Opportunities: Unable to automatically notify customers about their available credits
- Risk of Errors: Manual data entry increases the chance of mistakes
- Poor Customer Experience: Credits earned in-store aren't immediately available for online purchases
The Current Setup
Technology Stack:
- Vend POS: Managing in-store transactions and loyalty
- BigCommerce: E-commerce platform ($3M+ in annual online sales)
- Keap: Marketing automation and customer segmentation
Scale of Operations:
- 60,000+ customer records
- 3,000+ monthly transactions
- Two physical stores ($2.35M+ combined revenue)
- Growing e-commerce presence
The Solution
A streamlined integration approach:
- Implement webhook-based synchronization between Vend and Keap
- Utilize existing BigCommerce-Keap connection
- One-week implementation timeline
- Maintain existing RFM segmentation
Expected Results
Direct Benefits:
- Eliminate daily manual credit updates
- Enable automated credit balance notifications
- Save 10-15 hours per week in staff time
- Improve customer engagement through timely reward communications
- Potential reduction in integration costs
"The main thing is that Vend to Keap is the low hanging fruit that I want fixed" - PG, Owner
Next Steps
- Review existing Keap automation workflows
- Document loyalty data requirements
- Plan for streamlined implementation
