Overview & Concepts

In this section, you will find a set of guides that walk you through developing and launching a Digital Ordering integration with LoyaltyPlant. It is intended to accompany the Digital Ordering API specification.

1. What Digital Ordering is

LoyaltyPlant offers a white-label e-commerce, loyalty and marketing platform for restaurant chains. Customers make orders through the mobile or web app, collect loyalty points for online and in-store orders, and spend those points on rewards in the app.

The Digital Ordering API allows customers to place orders online and have them processed in your POS system.

A working integration delivers three business outcomes:

• Online sales through the loyalty app. Customers who already use your loyalty program can discover the menu and order without leaving the app — counter pickup, delivery, or dine-in.
• Loyalty earned and spent on every order. Each Digital Ordering purchase earns points, and customers can attach rewards to the order — reward items arrive at your POS at zero price. LoyaltyPlant grants the points when the order completes and reverses them if it is later canceled or refunded.
• One menu, always current. LoyaltyPlant keeps a synchronized copy of your menu — items, prices, modifiers, stop-list — so the app shows what you actually sell at each sales outlet.

Deciding which rewards apply, calculating points, and crediting them all happen on the LoyaltyPlant side — your POS reports and fulfills the order, and applies what LoyaltyPlant sends.

2. Who calls whom

Your service implements the API, and LoyaltyPlant calls it. LoyaltyPlant is the HTTP client; the /rest/* endpoints described in this contract — getting the menu, checking availability, creating and reading orders — live on your server, and LoyaltyPlant sends requests to them. This inverts the usual "we host an API, you call us" model, and it is the single most common source of confusion for teams starting a Digital Ordering integration.

There is exactly one exception, and it runs the other way: the order-status webhook. When an order's status changes, your POS calls LoyaltyPlant.

The diagram shows three directions of traffic:

Direction	Who calls	What travels	Where it is documented
Customer → LoyaltyPlant	the customer	menu browsing, cart, checkout, payment — all inside the app	the LoyaltyPlant app (not part of this contract)
LoyaltyPlant → your POS (solid)	LoyaltyPlant	the five /rest/* calls — menu, revision, healthcheck, create order, read orders	Ordering Flows, the capability guides, the spec
Your POS → LoyaltyPlant (dashed)	your POS	one status webhook per status change	the Status Webhook Guide, the orderStatusWebhook callback

The endpoints you host all live under the base URL LoyaltyPlant stores for you ({vendorBaseUrl}, finalized at onboarding) with a /rest prefix; the webhook you send targets LoyaltyPlant's base URL ({lpBaseUrl}, also given at onboarding).

3. What you build

You build a service that hosts a number of /rest/* endpoints and sends one webhook back. The request/response schema for each operation lives in the Digital Ordering API specification.

This service enables three key capabilities, each walked end to end in the Ordering Flows document:

• Menu synchronization. LoyaltyPlant pulls your menu on a schedule (never the reverse), using getMenuRevision to skip an unchanged menu and getMenu to re-import a changed one. An item you omit from the next menu is treated as a stop-list removal. Implementation steps are in the Menu Sync Guide.
• Order injection. After the customer pays, LoyaltyPlant healthchecks your sales outlet and, if every service is UP, calls createOrder to place the order; your POS returns the posId and queueNumber. Implementation steps are in the Order Injection Guide.
• Order status. Your POS reports each status change to LoyaltyPlant via the webhook (push), and LoyaltyPlant can also poll getOrders (pull) as a safety net. The nine lifecycle statuses are defined on the spec's OrderStatus enum. Implementation steps are in the Status Webhook Guide.

4. Integration project stages

From the first meeting to production traffic, a Digital Ordering integration moves through five stages, each with a clear exit before the next begins.

4.1 Kickoff

The LoyaltyPlant and vendor teams meet, walk through this documentation and the integration process, and agree on a communication channel — a direct chat with the LoyaltyPlant integrations team. LoyaltyPlant shares its development documentation, the integration checklist, a test app, test LP CRM access, and the certification test cases, and hands you your onboarding package — the test environment details and credentials you build and test against. You deploy and expose the /rest/* endpoints LoyaltyPlant will call (your {vendorBaseUrl}), and give LoyaltyPlant access to that test environment for the testing stage (see §4.3).

4.2 Development

You build the service that hosts the /rest/* endpoints and sends the order status webhook, working from this documentation set and the Digital Ordering API specification, with support from the LoyaltyPlant integrations team over the direct chat. Let LoyaltyPlant know about a week before you expect to finish so the testing slot can be scheduled.

4.3 Testing & QA review

You run the certification test cases against your integration and share a test report with LoyaltyPlant, along with access to your test environment. LoyaltyPlant reviews the integration flows against its test plan; any cases that work incorrectly come back to you as a fix list, you fix them, and the cycle repeats until everything passes. The Integration Checklist is the checkbox-auditable gate this stage reviews against.

4.4 Certification

You give a short demo of the key flows, and LoyaltyPlant confirms the integration as certified.

4.5 Pilot deployment

The certified integration launches for the first client — a mutual client of LoyaltyPlant and your company. The first deployment runs with LoyaltyPlant representatives present, or is recorded and shared with LoyaltyPlant. Once the pilot is stable, the integration is rolled out to further mutual clients and locations.

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