Portal sessions: let contacts use your loyalty programme on a screen in your store

A portal session is a screen for one contact at one location: your till or integration opens it on a device in your store, like a tablet facing the counter, and the contact uses it to identify themselves and do one thing, such as collect points, redeem a voucher or pay with a gift card. A session lasts 24 hours.

Portal sessions aren't the same as the contacts portal. The contacts portal is the website your contacts log in to from their own phone or computer. A portal session runs on your device, in your store, and only for the visit it was opened for. For the contacts portal, see How to configure the contacts portal.

Do you need portal sessions?

Probably not. Portal sessions are for a niche case. Think of them as a web-based version of the Business App: most of what a session does, you can also do in the Business App or in the business dashboard. If you can use either of those, that's the better choice.

Switch portal sessions on

Go to your account settings (the gear icon at the top right) and scroll to Features.
Open Apps and turn on Portal Sessions.
Confirm.

Portal Sessions then appears under Apps in the top menu.

Switching the feature on doesn't open any sessions by itself. Sessions are started by your till or by a developer's integration, through the Leat API or the portal sessions JavaScript SDK. If you're building one, see Build a custom integration with the Leat API and the Portal Sessions section of the API documentation at docs.leat.com.

What a session is for

Every session has a type, which decides what the contact can do on the screen:

Portal. The contact identifies themselves and then sees their own loyalty page: their balance, their activity, their rewards and vouchers, and their details.
Points transaction. The contact collects points.
Voucher. The contact links a voucher to themselves or redeems it.
Giftcard | Top up and redeem, Giftcard | Redeem only and Giftcard | Top up only. The contact pays with a gift card, tops one up, or both.
Prepaid | Top up and redeem, Prepaid | Redeem only and Prepaid | Top up only. The contact pays from their prepaid balance, tops it up, or both.
Generic. One entry point where the contact can use a voucher, a gift card, their loyalty card or their email address.

For redeeming a gift card or paying from a prepaid balance, the till sends the amount to pay along with the session.

How a contact identifies themselves

On the screen, the contact scans their loyalty card or QR code, either with the device's camera or with a hand scanner. Your integration decides per session whether contacts can also:

identify themselves with their email address instead,
sign up as a new contact on the spot, and choose their marketing preferences while they do,
type on an on-screen keyboard.

The till can also open a session for a contact it already knows, so the contact doesn't have to identify themselves at all.

The sessions list

Go to Apps → Portal Sessions to see every session that was opened, with its location (business profile), contact, status, type and when it was created. You can search by uuid and filter by business profile, contact, status, type and creation date.

Each session has one of 3 statuses:

Active. The session can be used.
Completed. The transaction the session was opened for went through. A session of type Portal has no transaction to finish, so it never shows Completed.
Expired. The session is more than 24 hours old and can't be used anymore.

A session only switches to Expired when somebody tries to use it after those 24 hours. An older session that nobody opened again can still show Active in the list, but it doesn't work.

Click a session to open it. It has 2 pages:

Information shows the session's type, contact and business profile. Its Settings tab shows what your integration switched on for that session, such as Email identification, On-screen keyboard and Scanner type. Open opens the session's screen in a new browser tab.
Events lists what happened in the session, step by step. It's the place to look when a contact says something didn't work.

New UI

The Enable new UI button at the top of the sessions list switches the screen your sessions open on to its newer version. Disable new UI switches back.

When something goes wrong

Portal Sessions isn't in the Apps menu. The feature is off. Turn it on under Features in your account settings.
A session stopped working. It's probably more than 24 hours old. Your till or integration has to open a new one.
Nothing shows up in the list. No session has been opened yet. Sessions only come from your till or integration, so check with whoever set it up.