An iPad In Every Store: Belly Wants Local Merchants And Their Customers To Ditch Those Paper Loyalty Cards

Digital loyalty is a hot topic right now, mainly because store loyalty is a system that's ripe for some technology innovation (all those paper punch-and-stamp cards...so old-fashioned!) and because it can be easier to implement a digital loyalty scheme than launching a full-fledged novel digital payment system--especially for the smaller-sized business, more mom-and-pop than IT geek. It's exactly into this market that Belly is launching today to change everything with a simple iPad.

The company's press release notes it "will offer a unique value proposition for small and medium sized businesses by replacing the traditional ‘buy 10 get one free punch cards’ with unique rewards that fit the personality of the business and connect consumers on a much more personalized level." The company was branded as Bellyflop during its pre-startup phase, but today it's rebranding and coming out of private test. Perhaps more intriguingly, and boding well for its future, it's seed-funded to the tune of over a million dollars by Lightbank--the investment firm from the guys who founded Groupon.

CEO and cofounder Logan LaHive and cofounder Ryan Jeffery (who is also a Founder In Residence at Lightbank) spoke today with Fast Company to explain their plan: "We create full custom and unique digital loyalty programs for small and medium-sized businesses," LaHive notes, "We put an iPad in their store, and then we create a fully customized digital loyalty system for that store based on their personality, culture, business objectives--all of those things."

It's actually a universal loyalty system, running on users' iPhones as an app--or with a dedicated card per customer--that simply requires you to scan your iPhone or Android phone or card over the in-store iPad at any participating merchant, then the iPad does all the loyalty processing over a net connection. To start with, it's a Chicago-based enterprise, but Belly has plans to quickly expand.

Forget the old paper-based cards, which are easily...

[Source: Fast Company]