swiping loyalty card
Answered
Can you tell me if it is possible to swipe loyalty cards?
if so can you tell me the requirements on the mag. swipe?
We are swiping our cards with no results, just a bad swipe message.
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Hi Steven!
Information about gift card and loyalty encoding requirements can be found here. We're also working on incorporating this information into our API documentation. Let us know if that page provides the info you're looking for, or if there are additional questions.
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That says for gift cards not loyalty card, is it the same information?
Also it doesn't say anything about characters other than any string will work, but it kind of implies it should be numbers?
Many loyalty cards are formated like ;33333? with some kind of leading and trailing character.
When we are swiping our cards we just get a swipe error and the swipe information is not sent to the interface to identify the customer. Is there more detailed information available? and do you have any customers using loyalty card swipes to identify the customer?
Thanks
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Hi Steven,
Evan chiming in here! I'm a Product Analyst for gift cards and loyalty at Toast.
This is a great question! You're absolutely right, that link does direct to an article that does specifically refer to gift cards. However, the information is similarly applicable to physical loyalty cards as Toast's card reading hardware recognizes a non-credit card magstripe the same. We will work toward publishing a loyalty-specific card encoding page in the future to help clarify.
For reference, our Toast native format for magstripe encoding would look something like this:
;8627123456789012?
Ultimately we'd recommend that the formatting would be similar. Less than 20 digits, and no extra/added digits aside from those of which identify the account number itself. Note that numeric digits are the only form of magstripe data Toast will parse, and alphanumeric characters (I.e. letters) would not be able to be parsed.
As an example, if you wanted to encode a card for a loyalty account with card number 9864-2323-1212-4545, the recommended magstripe encoding would look like this:
;9864232312124545?
There are other magstripe encoding patterns that Toast supports, however the above would be the best way to achieve the desired functionality with the least ambiguity. If you're receiving a "bad swipe" error, you can partner with our Care team to have a swipe test run through the restaurant in question. A swipe test would allow our Care team to look at the magstripe encoding of the card in question in order to configure Toast with a magstripe reading regex pattern that would hopefully allow for successful swipe and parsing of the magstripe data. Note that a swipe test with our Care team would require that the card in question be swiped on Toast card reading hardware signed in to a Toast restaurant. They may also identify that the encoding in the card in question may not be Toast-compatible.
Be sure to let us know if you have any additional questions regarding physical loyalty card encoding.0
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