Why build your own promotion infrastructure?

Being able to use the right tool for the job is more important than… eating breakfast or finding the perfect GIF response. As developers, we are constantly on the lookout for tools that let us get our jobs done faster and safer, with fewer "gotchas" and deployment headaches.

Does your company rely on a third party promotion solution with limited flexibility (read: frustrating)? Or maybe you're campaigning to finally refactor that legacy code that nobody quite understands anymore? Perhaps you've been trying to find the time to build a promotion engine on your days off which is powerful and flexible enough to manage all the annoying promotional campaign requests from your marketing team?

It's true that integrating a third-party service always has some complexity trade-off, but paying the (small) upfront development cost of integrating Talon.One gives great returns over time. If you don't need more flexibility or power than simple coupon-based rebates, Talon.One is probably not the right tool for you, but in our experience, the complexity of promotions (and the software that supports them) only grows over time.

We'd like to demonstrate this with some concrete scenarios, and we'll start with the simplest possible promotion: Applying a fixed discount with a valid coupon code from our free online coupon code generator.

To support this simple scenario in-house, you would need to do something a bit like this:

To support this use-case with Talon.One, starting from scratch with no integration, you would do something like this:

Even though we've glossed over a lot of complexity in Create a Coupon entity, I'd expect you could get an MVP version of these features built in-house in around the same time it takes to build the Talon.One integration.

As promotions get more complex however, the amount of change to your Talon.One integration remains minimal and predictable.

As our next example, let's consider a referral program. Referring a friend gives your friend a percentage discount on their first order, and yourself (the advocate) a coupon credit for a future purchase.

Even with this relatively simple promotion, the Talon.One integration starts to pay off right away, and the next time you want a variant on the referral program there's no new integration work to be done at all.

We haven't yet touched on other requirements such as targeting specific customer segments, scheduling promotions, creating and managing gift cards, etc. Any of these require a similarly small & predictable effort to integrate: Simply add an API call to feed the necessary information into Talon.One.

Check out our interactive Quickstart Guide and make your first API calls right from your browser, or read a tutorial on Integrating Talon.One to get a feel for how the integration looks in your codebase.

If you'd like to learn more about the challenges of building or buying your promotional software, we recommend you take a look at our white paper on the topic.