Instantor Rewards turned a merchant receipt into a loyalty checkout

The situation

Instantor has supplied plumbing products to the Irish trade since 1926. Its customers are plumbers and installers, and they buy Instantor fittings from builders' merchants. That's the problem a B2B loyalty program has to solve first: the brand never sees the sale. There's no checkout to attach points to and no purchase record of its own.

RaftLabs built Instantor Rewards for Sanbra Fyffe, Instantor's maker, through the loyalty agency BrandFire. The receipt the installer already keeps became the purchase record. Installers photograph it in the app, earn points, climb four tiers, and enter competitions. Instantor gets a direct, consented line to the people choosing its products.

The platform went live in about 15 weeks, in September 2021. It ran for more than three years, until the program closed at the client's request in December 2024.

The decisions that shaped the program

• With no checkout, the receipt became the purchase record

  A direct-retail brand credits points at the till. Instantor couldn't, because the till belonged to the merchant.

  So the earning action is the one an installer already takes: keeping the receipt. The app asks for a photo, the merchant branch, and the salesperson's name. The branch comes from a picker of 797 builders' merchant branches across all 32 counties of Ireland, seeded before launch. Each receipt therefore records where the installer bought, and from whom, as well as what they spent.

• Points were credited first and could be reverted later

  A receipt doesn't wait in an approval queue. When it uploads, a background job on a NestJS queue awards its points and writes an entry to the member's point history.

  If an admin later deletes a bad receipt, a second job finds that history entry and subtracts exactly the points it added. The history keeps both entries, so every balance can be traced back to the receipts behind it.

  The trade-off is plain: an invalid receipt holds its points until someone removes it. In return, installers see their points straight away and the admin team never works through an approval backlog.

• Points came from competitions, which created a gap

  A receipt's points are the sum of the points offered by every competition running when it was uploaded. That ties earning to the campaign calendar the agency controls.

  It also meant a receipt uploaded between competitions earned nothing, an edge case the program had to handle once real installers hit it. Competition timing ran on Hasura scheduled events, which also sent "about to end" notices. In December 2022, one competition failed to go live on schedule and needed a fix.

• Notifications took the longest to get reliable

  The team built its own notification system rather than using a third-party campaign tool. Admins send to selected installers through Firebase Cloud Messaging or broadcast to everyone, schedule sends ahead of time, and see recipient counts. Every message is also stored in-app with a read status.

  That control came at a cost. Notification problems surfaced within weeks of launch in October 2021, and a notifications bug stayed open from March to December 2024.

• Marketing consent moved from opt-out to opt-in

  At launch, the sign-up form asked installers to tick the channels they did not want to be contacted on. At the client's request, the team reversed that in December 2023. Installers now tick the channels they want: post, SMS, email, or in-app. Nothing is pre-selected.

  Tier-upgrade emails respect the same choice. An installer who turns off email doesn't get them.

1. Installers upload a receipt and see their points

   Installers photograph an Instantor purchase receipt, choose the merchant branch, and add the salesperson's name. The receipt counts toward every competition running that day, and the points appear on the member's balance and in their point history.

   

2. Four tiers make the next reward visible

   Tiers run from Member through Bronze, Silver, and Gold, each set by a minimum points total. The seeded thresholds were 50, 150, and 300 points, with Instantor merchandise at each level, from mugs and pens up to hoodies and jackets. Crossing a threshold triggers a tier-upgrade email.

   

3. Competitions give members a reason to keep uploading

   Admins publish competitions with a points value and a schedule. Members see what's running and who won, and get a notice when a competition is about to end. A separate photo contest let installers submit images, with winners picked from the entries.

   

4. The program team runs everything from one admin area

   Admins manage competitions, record and publish winners, edit the tiers and how-it-works content, and send and schedule notifications. Competitions, receipts, winners, and notification data export as CSV for reporting.

   

How it runs

Flutter

One codebase gave installers native iOS and Android apps with camera upload, push notifications, and competition and winner screens, while linked pages such as Instantor's about page opened in a built-in web view.

Next.js

The installer web app and the admin area shared one Next.js application, installable as a progressive web app for installers who preferred not to download an app.

NestJS

NestJS held the program rules: points, tiers, competitions, receipts, and notifications. Queues on Redis ran point awards, reversals, and tier emails in the background so uploads stayed fast.

Hasura

Hasura exposed the PostgreSQL data model and ran the scheduled events behind competition timing and scheduled notifications. In this build, every GraphQL request went through NestJS first.

Firebase

Firebase handled installer sign-in and delivered push notifications, both to selected installers and to everyone on the program at once.