Rewardr

Rewardr
Landing page
Login screen
Customer rewards dashboard
Redeemable reward

Inspiration

As more and more businesses discover the power of customer loyalty, our email inboxes get more and more cluttered with promotions, and we have to keep track of more and more rewards accounts. According to Invesp, a company specializing in conversion rate optimization, “a 5% increase in customer loyalty can increase the average profit per customer by 25%-100%” 1.

So, how do companies foster loyalty? One way is through customer loyalty rewards, where companies reward loyal shoppers with points and other benefits. While large businesses have the resources to engineer a complex customer loyalty system, creating one from scratch is much too costly for small businesses. This makes it much harder for local mom-and-pop businesses to compete against the likes of Amazon.

What it does

Rewardr would create significant value for both the consumer and the seller. On the consumer’s side, we provide:

Rewards—in exchange for your loyalty, you get to earn points through various means which can be redeemed for coupons or free food
One unified dashboard—view all your loyalty rewards, instead of having to remember and login to each separate business’ website
Convenience—customers can easily identify their account through a state-of-the-art facial recognition or through a QR code And on the seller’s side, we provide:
A SaaS platform—easy and cheap for businesses to host their loyalty rewards program through us
Results—customer loyalty rewards programs can boost average profit per customer up to 200%, and 69% of consumes choose retailers based on the availability of rewards points 1
Cost-effectiveness—faster checkout at the point-of-sale means better customer service, happier customers, and better reviews

How we built it

Our website uses several frameworks/libraries to make it run:

ReactJS—frontend to our website
Flask—backend to our website
serengil/DeepFace—helps represent faces in a hash vector which is stored in our database
Google Cloud—we use Compute Engine to host our server, Cloud Storage to store our images, and Cloud SQL to host our MySQL database

Challenges we ran into

We had a few major challenges while building the website, but eventually we resolved all of these issues:

Getting the frontend to be able to talk to the backend using cookies
Transferring the facial id data from the business to our servers require a base64 encoding, but the receiver (backend) wouldn’t be able to decode the base64 string

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Here’s what we’re proud of:

Learning how to take advantage of cloud platforms (Google Cloud)
Implementing a facial recognition component that’s fast and secure
Creating a complex app that routes data between businesses, users, and the server in 36 hours with the help of diagramming
Building a product from start-to-finish that creates real-world value

What's next for Rewardr

We have the foundations of a solid loyalty rewards system. The best way to improve our service is to talk to local small businesses and slowly build a customer base. There are many features we could implement, such as friend referral bonuses, a mobile app, customer loyalty tiers, more analytics, and more integration into payment services like Stripe. We believe that we have a strong business model that allows us to grow and expand our services that benefit both customers and businesses.