How it works

What the dealership does

Staff sign in with a magic link sent to their work email. There is no password to share, forget, or write on a sticky note beside a showroom terminal.

A salesperson or service advisor looks up a customer in their own dealership’s records — someone who already bought a vehicle from that store or has had one serviced there. They pick a service offer the store has set up, and the coupon is created with its own code, its own expiry, and terms captured as they stood on that day.

Each salesperson has a weekly allotment, currently ten coupons. Going over it is not forbidden, but it requires a manager to approve the request. The limit exists so that a coupon stays a considered gesture toward a particular customer rather than something sprayed at a list.

Then they send it. To one customer, about one coupon, by name.

What the customer sees

An email from the dealership they know, containing a single link. No attachment, no form, no request to create anything.

Tapping the link opens the coupon: what it is for, what it is worth, when it expires, and the full terms. From that page they can add it to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. That is the entire customer journey — open, tap, done.

They never create an account and never enter a password, because there is no account to create. The signed link they were sent is what identifies the coupon, and it works once.

At the service drive

When the customer comes in, an advisor scans the barcode on the pass. That opens the redemption screen with the coupon code already filled in, the advisor confirms the customer, and the coupon is redeemed.

Redemption is enforced on the server and it happens exactly once. A second attempt on the same coupon fails, whether it comes from a screenshot, a forwarded link, or the same pass scanned twice. A coupon is also bound to a household rather than to an individual, so a family can use the one that was sent to their address, but it does not become a transferable voucher.

About the messages we send

This section is written plainly because it is the part people reviewing us need to be able to check.

Who receives one

Only a dealership’s own existing customers. Every recipient has a prior business relationship with the store that is contacting them: they bought a vehicle there, or they have had a vehicle serviced there. The dealership holds that relationship and supplies the contact details from its own records.

We do not buy, rent, scrape, or import purchased contact lists, and there is no way inside Fossaris to upload one.

What kind of message it is

Each message is sent one at a time, by a named employee, to one customer, about one specific coupon that was written for that customer. It is transactional in character and low in volume — capped by the weekly allotment described above. It is not a bulk send, a broadcast, or a campaign, and Fossaris has no feature for sending one.

Nothing is ever sent on our own initiative. A message exists because a person at the dealership decided to send it to a customer they know.

Which channel

Today, email only. Every message identifies the dealership it comes from and carries a way to opt out of further messages.

Text messaging is planned and is not in service. We would rather say that than describe a channel we do not yet operate. When SMS does launch, it will follow the same rules: the dealership’s own customers, one message about one coupon, the sending dealership identified in the message, and STOP and HELP honoured on every message. Message and data rates may apply. Consent will be collected by the dealership from the customer before any text is sent, and an opt-out will stop them.

What we do with the data

The dealership decides what customer information enters the system and remains responsible for it; we process it to create, deliver, and redeem coupons on that dealership’s behalf. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising. The detail is in the Privacy Policy.

Each dealership’s data is isolated at the database level rather than by application code, so one store cannot read another’s customers even if something above the database is wrong.

What it deliberately does not do

• No app for the customer to download.
• No customer accounts, logins, or passwords.
• No purchased lists, no cold outreach, no bulk sends.
• No payment information. Fossaris never sees a card number, a credit application, or a Social Security number.
• No selling or renting of customer data, to anyone, for any purpose.

Questions about any of this are welcome at team [at] foundryandgritllc [dot] com.