Belly Inc. announced today that it is expanding its partnership with 7-Eleven and will be in a quarter of all its U.S. and Canadian convenience stores by the end of the year.
Belly, a Chicago startup that has built an iPad-based customer loyalty platform where users can get deals at local merchants, will be in 2,600 7-Elevens at the end of 2014, mostly in the Northeast.
"Our partnership with 7-Eleven proves our ability to increase customer spend and frequency of visits at the enterprise level,” Belly CEO Logan LaHive said in a news release. “There’s a need for large retail chains to have the right tools to track online and offline customer behavior and Belly provides this for them.”
More than 3 million people use Belly's rewards platform to score deals at local establishments, the company said. Belly is in 85 7-Elevens in downtown Chicago, and it's in another 350 locations throughout Chicago, Austin, and L.A. This month, 465 7-Elevenns in New York and Vancouver will begin using the service.
Along with being a customer loyalty platform, Belly has provided more than 20 marketing campaigns for 7-Eleven since March 2013, including email marketing and promotions to receive time-based rewards.
"Over a year and a half ago, we started looking for a solution to help increase customer visits, bring new guests to our stores and increase frequency of visits while also increasing basket size," said Raja Doddala, 7-Eleven senior director for new business development. "We look forward to expanding our relationship to even more stores and new markets."
