A loyalty program is a marketing strategy that shops can use to encourage their shoppers to purchase and continue purchasing items from their shop.
With CommentSold, your registered shoppers can earn account credit with every purchase that they can then apply to a future purchase.
How a Loyalty Program Benefits Your Shop
- Incentivize shoppers to keep purchasing from your shop.
- Registered shoppers can use loyalty credit as store credit on future purchases.
How the Loyalty Program Works
When you enable your loyalty program, you'll set a base percentage that registered shoppers can earn on every purchase. This includes the purchase of gift cards, waitlist authorized items, and comment charge purchases.
CommentSold will multiply each order’s subtotal by that percentage after it deducts:
- Sales tax
- Shipping costs
- Applied coupons or discounts (with the exception of secondary offers)
- Any portion of the payment made with account credits or gift cards
These amounts do not count toward earning loyalty credit.
CommentSold will retract earned loyalty credit on items a shopper returns to your shop. If you choose to refund the order back to the card used for the purchase, then CommentSold will display the amount of credit to be retracted.
If you choose to refund the customer using store credit, there is no need to retract loyalty credit. Shoppers will keep their original loyalty credits; however, they will not earn any additional loyalty credits when they pay with store credit. Shoppers can only earn loyalty credits with each new payment.
Learn more about processing returned items here.
Expected Behavior
| General Loyalty | Live Loyalty |
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Set Up Your Loyalty Program
Setting up your loyalty program involves three steps: enabling the program, choosing your conditions, and enabling a live sale bonus (optional).
- Select Setup in the side menu of your CommentSold dashboard.
- Select Loyalty Program at the top of the page.
- Enable the toggle at the right corner of Base Loyalty.
Your next step is to define the percentage that registered shoppers can earn and which collections and sales channels, if any, are required for earning credit.
- Enter the base percentage a registered shopper can earn on purchases (minus taxes, shipping, and discounts) in the Loyalty Amount field.
- Select the Sales Channels checkbox to specify from which sales channels shoppers can earn credit when purchasing. For example, shoppers can only earn credit from purchases made through your mobile app.
- Choose your desired channels from the drop-down list.
- To remove a channel, select the X to the right of the channel name.
- Select the Product Collections checkbox to specify certain collections shoppers can earn credit when purchasing. For example, shoppers can only earn credit on items included in a shop's Premium Skincare collection.
- Choose Include to limit the number of qualifying collections.
- Choose Exclude to broaden the number of qualifying collections.
- Schedule the Loyalty Program if desired by selecting Start Date/Time and End Date/Time.
- Select Save at the bottom of the section.
With Live Sale Loyalty, you give shoppers the opportunity to earn credit in addition to the base loyalty credit you specified on the previous tab. Enabling Live Sale Bonus is optional.
Registered shoppers can earn a live sale bonus when they purchase any product featured in a live sale regardless of the sales channel (e.g., Facebook, mobile app, etc.).
As a shop, you also have the option to allow shoppers to earn a live sale bonus within a specific window of time after a sale ends. This allows customers who aren't using your mobile app to have enough time to check out.
- Enable the toggle at the right corner of Live Sale Loyalty.
- Enter the base percentage credit you wish for customers to earn after completing a live sale purchase.
- Select Add as bonus to base loyalty checkbox if you wish to include this percentage as an addition to the base percentage they can earn.
- If you wish to give customers a window in which they can check out and still earn a live sale bonus post-live sale, select the Extend Live Sale Loyalty Period checkbox and enter the number of minutes in the provided field.
- Select Save at the bottom of the section.
Loyalty Campaigns allow you to design personalized reward programs that can operate on their own or complement your existing base and live sale loyalty initiatives.
- Enable the toggle at the right corner of Loyalty Campaigns.
- Select + Create Campaign.
- Create Loyalty Campaign:
- Enter a Title for the campaign.
- Enter a Description for the campaign.
- Enter the Loyalty Amount percentage credit you wish for customers to earn after completing a live sale purchase.
- Select Add as bonus to base loyalty checkbox if you wish to include this percentage as an addition to the base percentage they can earn.
- Select the Sales Channels checkbox to specify from which sales channels shoppers can earn credit when purchasing. For example, shoppers can only earn credit from purchases made through your mobile app.
- Choose your desired channels from the drop-down list.
- To remove a channel, select the X to the right of the channel name.
- Select the Product Collections checkbox to specify from which sales channels shoppers can earn credit when purchasing. For example, shoppers can only earn credit on items included in a shop's Premium Skincare collection.
- Choose Include to limit the number of qualifying collections.
- Choose Exclude to broaden the number of qualifying collections.
- Select Live Replays checkbox to specify which live sale replays are eligible to earn loyalty credits.
- Choose Include to limit the number of qualifying replays.
- Choose Exclude to broaden the number of qualifying replays.
- Schedule the Loyalty Program if desired by selecting Start Date/Time and End Date/Time.
- Select Save at the bottom of the section.
View Customer Loyalty Credit Balance
At any time, you can view the balance of a customer's loyalty credit from the Customers page in CommentSold.
- Select Customers in the side menu of your CommentSold dashboard.
- Scroll to locate a specific customer or use the Search field in the top-right corner of the table.
- View the total in the Store Credit column toward the right side of the table.
You can also view the history of a customer's credit balance. History includes earned credit, retractions due to returned items, and manual adjustments.
- Select the linked customer name in the Name column to view the customer profile.
- Scroll down and locate the Store Credit Balance Movement section.
What Your Shopper Experiences
After each purchase, customers will receive a notification email that details the amount of credit they earned with the purchase.
If the customer selects the View My Account Page button, they'll be taken to their account page where they can view their current account credits.
Hide Loyalty Information from Checkout and Cart
If you do not want loyalty information to appear in the checkout or cart view, you can easily turn it off.
By default, loyalty information is visible in the cart and checkout. If you prefer to keep this hidden, simply toggle off the Show Loyalty Info in Cart & Checkout option. This will remove loyalty-related messages from the customer’s checkout experience.
- Select Website Content in the side menu of your CommentSold dashboard.
- Select Preferences at the top of the page.
- Disable the Show Loyalty Earned on Checkout/Cart toggle.
FAQs
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Where to start if an order does not have loyalty rewards added:
- Compare the time that the Order was placed to the settings at that time based on the information available in the Shop Logs tab
- Was Base Loyalty enabled?
- Was Live Loyalty enabled?
- Did the product qualify for Loyalty through a Campaign?
- Compare the time that the Order was placed to the settings at that time based on the information available in the Shop Logs tab
Troubleshooting Errors
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Here are some common errors and their resolutions: Issue: Customer got live loyalty bonus after we turned the bonus off The settings that are in place for live loyalty bonus when the live sale starts will continue on even if you turn off the live loyalty before the allotted time runs out. Once the live has started, the clock has begun and toggling settings off won’t void the settings for that session. Issue: Customer didn’t get loyalty points for full amount of order Check if the order contains items from a collection that have been excluded from loyalty. If not, check the math. Loyalty applies to the order’s subtotal after:
Issue: Customer didn’t get Live loyalty points for order Check this:
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Interpreting Live Loyalty Changes in the Shop Logs Tab
Live Sale Loyalty Turned ON
Live Sale Loyalty is ENABLED
Live Sale Loyalty Turned OFF
Live Sale Loyalty is DISABLED
Loyalty Amount changed
Live Sale Loyalty changed from 15% to 25%
Enable/Disable as a Bonus to Base Loyalty
“Add as bonus to base loyalty”
ENABLED and DISABLED
ENABLE “Extend Live Sale Loyalty Period”
DISABLE Live Sale Loyalty Period
Change Live Sale Loyalty “Grace” Period
Interpreting Base Loyalty Changes in the Shop Logs Tab
Base Loyalty turned ON
Base Loyalty ENABLED
(Loyalty Program will retain settings that were set up before Base Loyalty was disabled)
Base Loyalty turned OFF
Loyalty Amount changed
Base Percentage changed from 10% to 15%
Sales Channels Added/Removed
Collection added or removed from “Include”/“Exclude” field
Collection “Example Products” was removed from “Excluded Collections”
“Excluded” Collections turned off
No Collections are excluded from Base Loyalty, meaning that all Collections now qualify for Base Loyalty
“Included” Collections turned off
All Collections now qualify for Base Loyalty
Start Date/Time & End Date/Time Turned on/Added
Start & End time/date is ENABLED
Start Date/Time & End Date/Time Turned off/Removed
Start & End were turned off, making Base Loyalty available without any date/time parameters
Changing Start Date/Time & End Date/Time
Base Loyalty Start & End were changed to a later date/time
Learn More
- Process Returns and Exchanges. Learn how to process returns and exchanges and how to make adjustments to store credit.
- Enable Your Referral Program. Learn how to enable and launch a referral program that rewards registered shoppers for bringing friends and family to your shop.