Integration Use-Case 1 - New Partners

This document describes the integration use case for a new Cartera partner. The use case assumes an integration with:

  • Online offers displayed on a partner's website/mobile app
  • Instore offers displayed on a partner's website/mobile app
  • The partner's website/mobile app identifies a user to Cartera through an encrypted "Member Identifier" token
  • The partner consumes rewards accrual files from Cartera, and sends accrual response files to Cartera.
  • The partner integrates with Rakuten In-Store Network (RISN) API for in-store content retrieval, credit card primary account number (PAN) registration, and other in-store operations.

Integration Points

Integration Points

This diagram describes the integration points between a partner and Cartera.

  • A partner's website/mobile app retrieves online offers from Cartera's content API
  • A partner's website/mobile app interacts with the RISN API to handle in-store content retrieval, credit card PAN registration, and other in-store operations (e.g. removeCard, linkOffer, auth notification, etc).
  • A partner's rewarding engine retrieves an accrual file from Cartera's SFTP server.
  • A partner's rewarding engine sends back a response file to Cartera's SFTP server.

Cartera Content API

The Getting Started Guide describes how a partner developer can retrieve the credentials needed to access the Cartera Content API. The Developer's Guide describes the basic HTTP request parameters and responses to make an API call, using the status end-point as an example.

A partner developer and product manager should also examine the Online Content Guide, which explains the different content objects retreived from the API.

In general, Cartera Content API encapsulates and passes through In-Store content retrieval calls to the RISN API. However, partner developers are instructed to retrieve In-Store contents directly from the RISN API, and not from Cartera Content API as described in the Instore Content Guide.

Lastly, for online offers, the document Member Identifier Generation describes how a unique user_id of a partner, can be encrypted and passed to Cartera. A developer will append an HTTP request parameter mem_id, to the clickUrl parameter returned by a call to the Content API (e.g. /merchants). A partner user would click on the appended clickUrl, which links to a Cartera hosted partner-domain site. The unqiue user_id is critical for tracking and attributing shopping rewards to a partner user.

RISN API

The document RISN Introduction is a quick introduction of the RISN API.

The document RISN API contains links to detailed RISN documentation.

Cartera SFTP Server

The document Accrual contains links to documentation for the accrual/response process.