Loyalty & rewards
Loyalty is one screen with five tabs, and the admin sums it up as: “Design the points economy, VIP tiers, reward catalog, and gamified challenges — then look up any member’s balance.”
It starts off, deliberately
Section titled “It starts off, deliberately”A new programme is disabled, and the admin says why in plain words on the screen: “Members won’t earn or redeem points while the program is disabled.”
That default is a kindness rather than an obstacle. A points economy is one of the few settings where a half-finished configuration is worse than none — customers who earn points against rates you were still experimenting with have a real expectation, and taking it back is a customer-service problem rather than a settings change.
Design it while it is off. Turn it on when the numbers are the ones you meant.
The five parts
Section titled “The five parts”| Tab | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Program | The economy itself: how points are earned and what they are worth. |
| Tiers | VIP levels — who gets treated differently, and at what threshold. |
| Rewards | The catalogue of what points can actually be exchanged for. |
| Challenges | Gamified goals that earn points for something other than spending. |
| Members | Looking up an individual’s balance. |
Points are a liability
Section titled “Points are a liability”The unglamorous framing that saves stores money: every unspent point is something you owe. A generous earn rate multiplied by a year of orders is a bill that arrives later, all at once, when a campaign reminds everybody to spend.
Two things follow. Decide what a point is worth in your own currency before you decide how many to give. And treat a change to the earn rate as a financial decision rather than a marketing one.
Challenges are for the behaviour you cannot buy
Section titled “Challenges are for the behaviour you cannot buy”Points for spending reward the customers you already have. Challenges are the part that can reward something else — writing a review, completing a profile, coming back in a quiet month.
If your loyalty programme is only “spend money, get points”, it mostly discounts the orders you were going to receive anyway.
What this page does not say
Section titled “What this page does not say”- It does not give click-paths. This screen has no verified screenshot in this help centre, and we do not print steps we have not checked against the admin as it is today.
- It does not recommend an earn rate or a tier threshold. Those depend on your margins, and a number printed here would be wrong for almost everyone reading it.
- It does not say whether points expire, or what happens to balances if the programme is switched off again. Both are real questions and neither has been checked against the current screen, so neither is answered here rather than guessed.