The API Infrastructure Gap Nobody Talks About: The Five Layers Needed to Actually Deliver a Global Rewards Catalog
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The dominance of gift cards in global incentive programs has less to do with preference than infrastructure—and as organizations confront the true complexity of global merchandise, a shift in strategy is emerging. This article explains how new API (applications programming interface) technology is making it possible to offer the latest brands and hot products available at scale in a way the brings back the power of brand merchandising to the incentive, rewards, and recognition business. By Jason Etter,
Vice President, Growth, Online Reward
Why Gift Cards Surged
The Five Layers Most Teams Underestimate
What the Build Decision Really Looks Like
What Makes an API Catalog Work vs. Just Function
The Practical Implication
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API (application programming interface) technology makes it possible for brands to make a comeback in the IRR market. The opportunity is to power all the incentive, reward, and recognition catalogs with real-time access to manufacturers and retail feeds. The challenge is that most IRR industry catalogs lack the ability to connect to real-time APIs. Given that API-powered feeds not only create a more compelling reward experience for participants and better value for IRR companies and their clients, some IRR companies might be tempted to build the platform on their own. Here’s how to determine what option makes sense for your company.
Why Gift Cards Surged
For years gift cards have dominated global rewards programs not because they deliver the most meaningful experience, but because they were the easiest to scale. In the absence of infrastructure capable of supporting global merchandise fulfillment, they became the default solution. Yet that dominance is increasingly being reexamined as organizations recognize what’s been missing: the deeper, more durable emotional connection that curated merchandise can create and the fact the companies end up paying retail for what many businesses can access at wholesale. The challenge is that delivering merchandise at scale is far more complex than it appears. A truly global rewards catalog, or even an API-powered domestic catalog, requires mastery across multiple operational layers—from catalog depth and configurability to service models, compliance, and economic alignment.
Many organizations attempting to build these capabilities internally discover too late that they’ve created an expensive, non-core parallel business, with the real complexity only becoming clear when expansion hits a second market. As a result, the economics—and the operational reality—are pushing more organizations toward specialized partners capable of managing this complexity at scale.Our company, Online Rewards, has been building and operating global rewards fulfillment infrastructure since 2002. The programs we support span channel sales incentives, consumer rebates, wellness rewards, and customer loyalty across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and technology. In that time, we’ve watched what happens when organizations try to build this themselves. The pattern is consistent enough to be a lesson.
This isn’t an argument for any solution. It’s an account of the complexity that tends to get underestimated, the costs that surface late, and what competent fulfillment infrastructure requires. Organizations that understand this before they commit to a path make better decisions. The ones that discover it mid-build rarely recover cleanly.
In the early 2000s, moving reward catalogs online looked straightforward. For context, J.C. Penney was still mailing the big book twice a year. Most vendors built digital interfaces on top of analog operations. Product data was pulled manually, often quarterly. Pricing was static. Inventory wasn't verified in real time. When a participant tried to redeem something out of stock, the experience collapsed at the exact moment it was supposed to deliver.
Gift cards solved that logistics problem, and the economics did most of the selling. At small denominations, merchandise has a shipping problem. When the reward budget sits below $30 to $40, a disproportionate share of the value disappears into fulfillment cost. The gift card carries no visible shipping line item. To the recipient, it looks like better value, even when it isn't. That perception mattered more than the reality, and the market responded accordingly.
The higher up the denomination scale, though, the weaker that logic gets. Once you're past the low end, gift cards mostly flow toward fuel, Amazon, Walmart, Macy's. If participants are buying merchandise anyway, the question stops being "gift card or merchandise" and becomes "whose merchandise, and who controls the shopping and redemption experience.
The answer should have been obvious. It wasn't, because the alternative didn't exist yet. When it comes to advocating for the use of brand merchandising in the IRR industry as is prevalent at retail, let's simplify this with a quote anyone can relate to: "It's not our job to 'save' movie theaters. It's Hollywood's job to make stuff actually worth leaving the house." — Ryan Gosling
Merchandise creates durable emotional connection in ways a gift card rarely does. A Patagonia vest earned at work; selected from the company's own branded reward catalog and worn for years carries different weight than a card spent in a single transaction and forgotten. People remember where the barbecue came from, where they used the luggage, who gave them the fishing rod. They don't remember the gift card balance, often leading to what the industry calls breakage—unspent points. Program sponsors feel this too: unused gift cards are a concrete sign of failure; money budgeted for recognition that never actually landed. That outcome is worse than a bad experience. It's an invisible one.
The RRN panel cited early data showing brand redemptions rise significantly when participants access real-time catalogs with current inventory and promotional pricing. That result isn't surprising. What's surprising is how long it took for the infrastructure to exist. The reason it took so long is operational. Building and maintaining real-time fulfillment across dozens of suppliers requires overhead and quality control that most intermediaries do not want to own. The RRN panel noted that roughly 75% of retail connections are now API-powered, while only about 25% of reward catalogs have real-time capability. That gap doesn't exist because the technology isn't available. It exists because the infrastructure problem is harder than it looks from the outside. The market didn't choose gift cards. It chose them because nobody had built a credible alternative at scale.
The Five Layers Most Teams Underestimate
Delivering a global rewards catalog isn’t a single engineering problem. It’s five distinct operational challenges that have to work simultaneously, and each one has a failure mode that isn’t obvious from the outside.
Catalog depth. Participants compare redemption experiences to what they can order from a retail site in 30 seconds. A static catalog of a few hundred SKUs isn’t a smaller version of a good catalog. It’s a categorically different experience. The RRN panel cited programs expanding from roughly 400 SKUs to 2,600 or more when real-time brand connections are active, with measurable impact on redemption behavior. Maintaining that depth requires live supplier feeds, not periodic uploads.
Configurability by client and market. No two enterprise programs have the same catalog requirements. A financial services firm running channel incentives has different needs than a healthcare company running wellness rewards or a manufacturer running a global sales program. Configuring catalogs by client, audience, geography, and reward type is not an advanced capability. It is the baseline for any program operating at enterprise scale. The vision care insurance company VSP has run configurable catalog and rebate tools for eye care professionals since 2014, with product and promotion logic specific to each segment of their network. That kind of precision requires infrastructure designed for it from the start, not retrofitted later.
Tiered customer service. Fulfillment failures don’t just create operational problems. They create participant experiences that undermine the program’s purpose if inferior. A failed digital code or a damaged shipment that takes two weeks to resolve leaves a stronger impression than the reward itself. Enterprise programs across multiple markets need first-tier support accessible through the client’s interface and second-tier specialists who handle supplier disputes, warranty claims, and cross-border logistics. That infrastructure takes years to build and staff correctly. Organizations that underestimate it end up with their own operations team absorbing a function it wasn’t designed to own.
Compliance as a living system. Tax obligations, data privacy regulations, customs duties, and anti-bribery rules vary by jurisdiction and change on timelines outside anyone’s control. Compliance across dozens of markets isn’t a one-time setup. It’s an ongoing legal and engineering function. One Life Health operates wellness reward programs for more than 1 million members across more than 20 Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations, each with specific HIPAA data requirements and reward logic. Compliance at that scale is architecture, not configuration. Deloitte’s 2025 Total Rewards research found that 62% of executives report their rewards programs fail to produce measurable business impact. Compliance gaps that surface mid-program are one of the most common and least visible reasons programs underperform.
Model alignment. Point bundles and upfront inventory commitments create breakage that benefits the vendor. A model that pays on redemption puts the vendor’s economics in line with actual program performance. This distinction matters more than it appears in early contract negotiations. Over a multi-year program, the difference in total cost compounds significantly.
What the Build Decision Really Looks Like
The build-vs.-buy analysis for global rewards fulfillment might look doable on paper when scoped from a domestic starting point, even when the issue of APIs is added. The complexity that makes internal builds expensive only becomes visible when you expand.
Year one is manageable. A handful of domestic supplier contracts, a redemption portal, a working catalog. Leadership sees a product and assumes the hardest work is done. Then the second market arrives. The supplier you contracted for physical goods doesn’t have an API feed. You’re back to CSV uploads. Your catalog is stale within weeks of launch. Currency conversion, VAT compliance, and local return logistics each require expertise that wasn’t in scope when the project was approved. The team that built the domestic catalog is now trying to learn the operational requirements of markets it doesn’t know.
By year three, the real cost is visible. Dedicated compliance staff. Supplier relations management across dozens of contracts. Engineering cycles spent on catalog maintenance rather than product development. A tier-two support function that operations absorbed because there was no one else to take it. At this point, the organization has built a parallel business inside itself that isn’t its core competency, requires ongoing investment to stay current, and is still years behind what a dedicated fulfillment partner already delivers.
The economics of aggregation are a significant part of why internal builds rarely close that gap. A fulfillment partner aggregating purchasing volume across hundreds of programs accesses supplier pricing that a single organization’s direct relationships can’t match. When total cost of ownership includes the teams, contracts, and systems required to maintain a global engine, the internal build is almost always the more expensive path, even before accounting for the opportunity cost of the engineering capacity it consumes.
Netspend has operated its channel sales rewards program since 2010 using configurable promotions, gamification, and catalog fulfillment across a national network of sales reps. That means 15-plus years of program operation without building or maintaining fulfillment infrastructure internally. The value of that decision doesn’t show up in year one. It compounds every year after.
What Makes an API Catalog Work vs. Just Function
The RRN panel drew a distinction that’s worth underlining: infrastructure and merchandising are not the same issue. A real-time feed of thousands of SKUs without curation logic is a warehouse with a search bar. It functions. It doesn’t work.
Real-time feeds now make it possible to carry rich product content alongside inventory: detailed descriptions, multiple images, video, promotional pricing that reflects what’s available in retail right now. That’s a material improvement over static catalogs built on quarterly data pulls. But the infrastructure improvement doesn’t replace the curation question. Someone still has to decide which product categories belong in a given program’s catalog. Which items match the audience’s geography and life stage. Which brands reinforce what the program is trying to communicate. See RRN: How APIs and Merchandising Can Restore the Power of Brands.
This is true across program types. channel incentives, consumer rebates, customer loyalty, and wellness rewards all share the same dynamic: the catalog has to function as an experience, not a transaction. Redemption rates, breakage, and participant engagement all move meaningfully when the catalog is curated deliberately rather than populated by default. The infrastructure enables that. It doesn’t produce it automatically.
The printed catalog era lost something real when the industry moved online. The merchandising discipline, the deliberate curation of assortment and product narrative, largely disappeared in the shift toward volume and self-service. The technology now exists to recover both: real-time infrastructure with the reach and freshness that legacy catalogs never had, combined with the curation judgment that made merchandise programs worth running in the first place.
The Practical Implication
The RRN panel framed this as an industry at an inflection point. Real-time API connections are standard in retail. The incentive, recognition, and loyalty market is catching up, unevenly and slowly, for reasons that have more to do with operational investment than technical capability.
For organizations deciding right now how to approach domestic and global rewards fulfillment, the meaningful questions aren’t about features. They’re about operational reality. Do you have the supplier relationships, the API management capabilities, the compliance architecture, the service infrastructure, and the catalog curation expertise to deliver a retail-quality experience across every market your program touches? If yes, build. If not, understand what closing those gaps will cost in time, capital, and engineering focus before you commit to a path.
Twenty-five years of operating in this space has produced one consistent observation: the organizations that underestimate fulfillment complexity don’t discover it during planning. They discover it in year two, when the second market goes live and the scope of what they built becomes clear. The organizations that avoid that outcome aren’t necessarily smarter. They just asked harder questions earlier.
That’s why almost no one builds their own customer relationship management software anymore.
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