Retail requires businesses to closely integrate physical points of sale with online platforms. For this, the synchronization mode of the accounting program with the online store is used, which allows automating the exchange of goods, prices and orders, creating a single information database.
One of the key tasks of this omnichannel approach is retaining new customers through effective loyalty programs.
However, when implementing the system, entrepreneurs often ask specialists the following questions: "Why are bonuses not accrued to a new customer after the first purchase on the website?", "Why do bonuses start accumulating only from the second order?" and "How should the program or website be configured so that the buyer is guaranteed to receive bonus points immediately for the first online order?".
The answers to these questions are related to the basic principles of the bonus system and the technical parameters of data exchange.
Basic logic of bonus accrual for new customers
To understand why questions arise with orders from the website, it is worth looking at the standard operating principle of the bonus system in a physical store. By default, if a newly created customer makes their first purchase, bonuses are not accrued to them (even if the first accumulation threshold starts from UAH 0), and bonus accrual starts only from the second purchase.
If the entrepreneur needs bonuses to be accrued to the customer directly from the first purchase, specialists recommend manually entering the required discount in the discount percentage field when creating the new customer card. Thanks to this, during the first purchase, the program will already understand the base rate and accrue bonuses from this discount.
Specifics of processing the first online order
In the case of online sales, the customer registration process is automated. In the settings of the online store synchronization object, you can instruct the program to automatically create new customers from orders and immediately set the required parameters for them: discount type, discount card type, initial discount percentage, etc.
However, in practice, entrepreneurs notice the following: when an order is loaded from the online store, the program correctly creates a new customer and generates an invoice, but the invoice itself remains without bonus accrual. But when the same customer places a second order on the website, bonuses are accrued correctly.
Technical reasons: SalePolicy and the SaleType parameter
The difficulty of automatically accruing bonuses for the first online order lies in the algorithm for calculating sale conditions (SalePolicy). When an order with the status "completed sale" (which creates an invoice with 100% prepayment) or "completed sale with shipment" is loaded from the online store, the program tries not to run the discount recalculation algorithm. This is done for the security of financial accounting: changing the price through discounts may result in an already paid online order becoming overpaid or underpaid.
In addition, in the past there was a problem when, during invoice generation from a remote customer order, the discount that had just been set when creating the customer could be automatically reset (especially if the invoice was created with 100% prepayment), even if a sales invoice was immediately created for it. The developers improved this mechanism by removing the unnecessary launch of customer discount recalculation when entering a prepayment, since prepayments for an invoice should not affect the amount used to calculate the discount.
Currently, in the Torgsoft program, correct automatic bonus accrual for an issued order from an online store occurs only if the SaleType = 1 parameter is present in the order file. This parameter means "preliminary order", for which an invoice is generated, and it allows the system to safely apply all bonuses. Instead, if your online store passes another value in the exchange file (for example, SaleType = 5, which gives the command to create an invoice immediately), automatic bonus accrual by the Torgsoft program does not occur.
How to guarantee bonus accrual for online buyers?
To provide comprehensive answers to entrepreneurs’ questions and ensure correct bonus accrual for the first online purchase, technical support specialists recommend using the following solutions:
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Correct configuration on the website side. The most reliable and automated method is to contact the developers of your online store or platform specialists so that they configure the export of order files with the SaleType = 1 parameter. This will allow the Torgsoft program to first create a remote customer order and then issue an invoice with correct bonus point accrual.
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Manual price update (as a temporary solution). If, for certain reasons, your website has to pass other SaleType types (for example, 5), the store manager who processes orders in Torgsoft can open the automatically created invoice and manually use the «Update prices» action. After that, the program will forcibly recalculate the conditions and accrue the bonuses due to the customer.
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Waiting for a system update. Torgsoft developers are aware of the business need for more flexible bonus accrual. A technical task has currently been created (№201690), the implementation of which in future program versions will allow bonuses to be automatically accrued for online store orders with other values of the SaleType parameter as well.
Using these recommendations will allow online store owners to establish smooth operation of loyalty programs, motivating new customers to return for their next purchases.
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