LevelUp Sweetens a Merchant’s Loyalty Program And Adds NCR As a Point-of-Sale Partner

A plan to expand its footprint in mobile payments by offering white-label applications to merchants is quickly paying dividends for LevelUp, the mobile-payments unit of Boston-based SCVNGR Inc.

Washington D.C.-based Sweetgreen, a 17-location chain of organic salad shops, has become the first LevelUp merchant to roll out a branded mobile-payment app developed by LevelUp. About 20 of LevelUp’s 5,000 merchants have opted to purchase its application programming interface (API), which the company made available in March, so they can develop their own white-label apps.

Sweetgreen customers using the new app can pay with their LevelUp wallet and have rewards downloaded directly to it. The app integrates to Sweetgreen’s existing point-of-sale system, with LevelUp providing loyalty tracking, customer analytics, engagement tools, and data security.

Customer reception to the app has been strong since it debuted about 10 weeks ago, accounting for about 18% of Sweetgreen’s transactions, more than the volume for MasterCard and American Express purchases and on par with that of cash transactions, according to LevelUp. Additionally, about 12% of the apps’ users downloaded it on the recommendation of other Sweetgreen Rewards users.

To motivate customers to use the app, Sweetgreen is offering three tiers of rewards based on their cumulative spending, called Green, Gold, and Black. As consumers reach the next tier, they receive more perks. Customers in the Green tier, for example, receive $9 in loyalty points for every $99 they spend and special rewards on their birthday. Rewards in the Black tier are only revealed to customers when they qualify for it. Sweetgreen also donates 1% of every purchase to local charities dedicated to educating children about healthy eating.

“As a white-label app all the functionality around Sweetgreen’s loyalty program is unique to Sweetgreen,” says Matt Kiernan, marketing manager for LevelUp.

In addition to providing Sweetgreen with a mobile platform for its loyalty program and payments, the app speeds checkout. It requires four seconds less to complete a transaction compared to a purchase made with a credit card and is 20 seconds faster than a cash transaction, according to LevelUp.

Consumers fund their LevelUp wallets with a credit or debit card. To make a purchase, users open their smart-phone’s LevelUp app, which displays a bar code linked to their funding source, and scan it at the point of sale. The purchase is then charged to the consumer’s card. LevelUp has signed about 5,000 merchants nationwide versus about 1,200 a year ago, and has 1 million users, twice the number it had at the start of 2013.

In a separate deal, LevelUp reached an agreement to integrate its wallet platform into NCR Corp.’s Aloha POS system for restaurants and NCR’s Cloud Connect, a cloud-computing-based POS software platform.

Integration of LevelUp into its Aloha POS system will enable NCR to offer restaurants another way to accept mobile payments and market to customers through mobile devices, according to NCR. Merchants using the Aloha system will be able to accept LevelUp through their POS register as opposed to the customer scanning the LevelUp code on another terminal and the cashier entering the amount on his register.

In addition, all card and cash payment transaction data are automatically downloaded to the merchant’s back-office accounting and reconciliation applications. Merchants can still access the separate LevelUp dashboard for analytics on LevelUp customers.

“This streamlines the LevelUp acceptance process at the point of sale for merchants using the Aloha system and makes reconciliation easier for the merchant,” says Kiernan.

Integration to Cloud Connect, a hosted software platform, will allow NCR to deploy software and updates to more than 100,000 merchant locations on its Aloha, Radiant POS, and Advanced Restaurant System platforms.

The NCR deal comes two months after LevelUp announced a pact with the big merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc. that will make LevelUp available to Heartland merchants.