Customer groups and sales promotions
AssigneeSquare, Inc.
InventorsPhil Zigoris, Abhay Sukumaran, Steve Conover
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
An online transaction processing service may be used by a merchant to process payments for purchase transactions. The service may also support the merchant in other ways, such as by managing sales promotions and points-based loyalty programs. The service is configured to recommend the number of points to be redeemed for a particular sales promotion. The recommendation may be based on promotional goals of the merchant, on the number of reward points held by the customers of the merchant, on historical redemption rates by qualifying customers, etc.
Claims20
A method performed by one or more computers of a payment processing system, the method comprising:
- maintaining, at the one or more computers of the payment processing system, a reward account for each of multiple customers of a merchant, the reward account indicating a current number of reward points of each customer;
- receiving transaction data at the one or more computers of the payment processing system from a mobile point-of-sale (POS) device associated with the merchant, the transaction data indicating (a) transaction amounts for respective purchase transactions and (b) products purchased by individual customers;
- adding reward points to the reward account of a customer in accordance with the transaction data;
- receiving a promotion goal of the merchant from the POS device, wherein the promotion goal specifies (a) a product that is to be offered in exchange for redeeming reward points and (b) a target number of customers to obtain the product in exchange for redeeming the reward points;
- determining a number of the reward points that will be redeemable to obtain the product, wherein at least the target number of customers each has at least the determined number of reward points;
- and
- sending the determined number of reward points to the POS device as a first recommendation for a sales promotion that is likely to achieve the promotion goal of the merchant.
A system, comprising:
- one or more processors;
- one or more non-transitory computer-readable media storing instructions executable by the one or more processors, wherein the instructions program the one or more processors to perform actions comprising:
- maintaining a reward account for a customer of a merchant, the reward account indicating a current number of reward points of the customer;
- receiving an indication of at least one product from a merchant device associated with a merchant;
- determining a sales promotion for the particular product, wherein the sales promotion comprises (a) a price discount for the particular product and (b) a determined number of reward points that will be redeemable by the customer to obtain the price discount;
- and
- sending the sales promotion to the merchant device as a recommendation to the merchant.
A method comprising:
- maintaining reward accounts for customers of a merchant, the reward accounts indicating current numbers of reward points of the customers;
- receiving an indication from a device associated with the merchant of at least one product to be offered in a sales promotion in exchange for redemption by a customer of reward points;
- determining a first number of reward points that will be redeemable to obtain the product based at least in part on the current numbers of reward points;
- and
- sending an indication of the first number of reward points to the device associated with the merchant as a recommendation to the merchant for the sales promotion.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.