In this article, you'll learn:
- How to enable and configure your CommentSold loyalty program.
- How to offer bonus credit during live sales.
- How to view customer loyalty credit balances and history.
- How refunds affect loyalty credit.
About Loyalty Programs
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 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.
- 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 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.
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.
- Select the Enable Loyalty toggle to configure your program settings.
Your next step is to define the percentage that customers can earn and where they can use those rewards.
- Enter the base percentage a customer can earn on purchases (minus taxes, shipping, and discounts) in the Base Loyalty Earnings field.
- Select the Sales Channels checkbox to specify the sales channels where a customer can apply their loyalty credits.
- 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 which collections a customer can apply their credit toward.
- Choose Include to make specific collections available.
- Shops can use this option to narrow customer choice to a limited number of collections. For example, if a shop wants customers to apply their credit toward dresses, they might select their short dress and maxi dress product collections only.
- Choose Exclude to leave out a specific collection(s).
- Shops can use this option to expand customer choice to a larger number of collections. For example, if a shop wants customers to apply their credit to all skincare collections except the premium line, they would simply choose that collection to make it unavailable.
- Choose Include to make specific collections available.
- Select Save Settings at the bottom of the page.
With Live Sale Bonus, 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.
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.
- Select the Live Sale Bonus toggle.
- Enter the percentage credit you wish for customers to earn after completing a live sale purchase.
- Remember, this percentage is in 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 Allow shoppers to checkout for X minutes after live sale checkbox and enter the number of minutes in the provided field.
- Select Save Settings at the bottom of the page.
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 shopper selects the View My Account Page button, they'll be taken to their account page where they can view their current account credits.
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 shoppers for bringing friends and family to your shop.