Our S Loyalty merchants have been local businesses, leaders in niche consumer industries, and Shopify Plus merchants selling worldwide who grow by connecting with and retaining loyal customers through a personalized rewards program. In order to succeed, online merchants must deliver localized and memorable customer shopping experiences that gain customer loyalty. At S Loyalty, we are responding to merchant needs to cater to growing regional markets, such as Asia, where the B2C market is expected to nearly double from US$625 billion to US$ 1131 billion between 2014 and 2020, according to Accenture (2015).
We have been making a series of feature upgrades to enhance shopping experiences for customers worldwide while keeping things automated and simple for merchants. We are excited to announce the first set of advanced features for customer point earning, which will help merchants adjust point accumulation to better match their currencies, and also a pending period for points to reduce the incidents of shoppers making purchases and refunding items right after using their points.
All merchants using S Loyalty 2.0 can activate these two new features in their merchant console’s Earning Points section.
Set Up Point Earning Rules For Currencies with High Digits
We’ve made a small change that could make a big impact on how your rewards program looks. As we have increasing demand from merchants in Asian markets, we are now giving merchants the option to give 1 point for every $10/$20/$50/$100/$1000 or local currency unit spent. In the past, when the minimum was 1 point for every $1 spent, shoppers for stores in Indonesia would probably start with 15,000 points! Things would be much simpler if we could drop a few zeroes.
Now, merchants with home bases in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, India etc. will be able to choose between the following two options:
- earn X points for every $1 spent, (e.g. 5 points per US $1)
- earn 1 point for every $X spent, (e.g. 1 point per JP ¥50)
Merchants who select “earn 1 point for every $X spent” can choose between options for $10/$20/$50/$100/$1000. For example, if a merchant selects “earn 1 point for every $100 spent”, customers might earn the following depending on the store’s base currency:
- earn 1 point for every 100 (such as Japanese Yen)
- earn 10 points for every 1000 (such as Korean Won)
- earn 100 points for every 10,000 (such as Indonesian Rupiah)
This feature is available to Shopify and BigCommerce users with S Loyalty 2.0. For existing users, this point earning ratio feature can be found in merchant console > Program Settings > Earning Points.
For merchants trying S Loyalty for the first time, you will be shown this option after installing S Loyalty and doing our 5-minute setup wizard.
Merchants should note that this point earning rule can only be set once, to ensure that the points earnings are consistently calculated. Of course, we are always here to help. Please contact [email protected] if you need any assistance.
Attract repeat customers with a points pending period
How do you know the new customers you’ve acquired will be the right customers? According to Shopify, 64% of retailers said that first-time customers from Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) have a lower lifetime value (LTV) than new customers during other times of the year because BFCM shoppers make fewer repeat purchases later on. Successful holiday campaign strategies must be built into an effective loyalty lifetime cycle.
Part of the effective lifetime cycle is in the details, such as when customers can redeem their points with rewards. While new customers may soon make a second purchase with the points they earned from the first one, they may also make refunds immediately as well. These details of when customers make purchases, redemptions, and refunds can sometimes cause problems for merchants. For example, what happens when a customer makes a refund after they have used their points to redeem a discount code? To help merchants avoid these scenarios, we have created a simple feature called a pending period.
Merchants can turn on a pending period with the click of a button and choose between either 14 or 30 days before a shopper can use the points they have earned.
How will customers respond to the wait? The waiting period helps screen out customers who make frequent refunds and attracts quality new customers who are truly interested in your products. Plus, your brand’s true fans won’t notice because they will be waiting for your next campaign and new item releases! As the program automatically adds points after the pending period, there is no extra work for merchants.
For online stores that have activated this feature, shoppers will be able to see their “Available Balance”, which they can immediately use to redeem rewards, and “Balance” which is the total balance including pending points.
Existing S Loyalty customers will be able to activate this feature in the merchant console > Program Settings > Earning Points. Merchants can quickly set up a pending period by going to the “Points Pending Period” section and clicking on the “Set pending period” for 14 or 30 days.
This feature is available to Shopify and BigCommerce users with S Loyalty 2.0.
S Loyalty is available for merchants on Shopify and BigCommerce. Try S Loyalty for free today!