Since its creation in 1973 by a voter-approved constitutional amendment, the Ohio Lottery Commission has been more than just a defining institution of the Buckeye state. Lottery profits have contributed more than $22 billion to public education, accounting for roughly 4% of annual funding needed statewide. Today, the Ohio Lottery Commission offers customers a wide variety of instant games and online games to play at more than 10,000 licensed retailer locations across the state.

In addition to the traditional lottery games, the Ohio Lottery Commission offers a series of Second Chance Promotions: opportunities for people with non-winning tickets to still win prizes. These prizes come in a variety of forms, but most are sourced from leading online retailers. With an ever-growing customer base, it became increasingly imperative to find an automated way to purchase and deliver these prizes.

Prior to partnering with Zinc Technologies, managing prizes meant going through the tedious process of overseeing multiple retailer accounts, navigating through a number of different retailer interfaces, and tracking each item individually, all while trying to find the best prices and shipping rates. While Zinc offers a series of APIs to automate these processes, organizations such as the Ohio Lottery Commission not equipped to integrate APIs into their existing infrastructure need something more streamlined and approachable.

Enter the File Exchange Service: the easiest way for non-technical users to use Zinc API. Developed as the result of consulting sessions between Zinc and the Ohio Lottery Commission, the File Exchange allows customers to automate Amazon orders with no developer integration. Once customers are set up, you can email us a CSV of orders to place and we will run them through our API on the customer’s behalf.

Zinc software will run these orders through our API. It will also add three columns — "Status", "Order IDs", and "Price" — and email the csv back to the customer. The "Status" field will contain either "successful" or an error message describing why the order could not be placed, the order IDs are the retailer's merchant IDs, and the price will indicate the final post-tax price paid.

Today, the Ohio Lottery Commission uses the File Exchange for all their Second Chance Promotions prize management, allowing them to easily order items en masse while optimizing for speed and price all with just a single CSV attachment.

Sound interesting? Get in touch.