Reward Points

Overview

The reward points program is also referred to as a loyalty program.  It's intended to encourage your customers to come back to your store to spend more money, time and time again.  Each time they spend money, they get rewards in the form of points, which they'll later be able to use as a form of currency or store credit later during checkout.  The entire program is one that you define though, so you can be as generous or frugal as you'd like with how you allow your customers to accrue points.

The most common analogy for the program is your grocery store.  Each time you scan your loyalty card or enter your phone number, you get rewarded for shopping there.  You either get instant discounts, or you're rewarded later with discounts.

Requirements

The following prerequisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Have access to your Hotcakes store administration

Getting Started

There are no prerequisites to follow along with this article.

Reward Points

You'll find the reward points program in the marketing menu of your control panel.

There are a number of settings that you can set and tweak over time to continue to influence the behavior you're looking for from your customers.

The left column has the most common settings you might be looking for.  You can change these settings at any time, but any changes you make are not retroactive.  The updates you make will only impact NEW reward point accruals and redemptions and will not change any that have happened in the past.

Setting	Description
Program Name	You can name this whatever you'd like.  This is a personalization label that could help brand your reward points program to your customers.
Points Issued	This setting expects a full number to help define how many points your customer might earn towards a purchase.  In the default, your customers earn a single point for each dollar they spend in your store.
Point Redemption	The redemption is where you determine how much value each reward point has.  The default setting of 100 makes your reward points worth a penny.
Reward Ratio	The reward ratio helps you to visualize the value you've determined based on the changes you've made in the previous two settings.  This value will update anytime you make a change, as shown below.

Here, you can see that the reward ratio increased to 10% once the redemption setting was changed to 10.  This made each reward point worth $0.10.

The right column has some informational content that will help you keep an eye on your program over time, as well as a few settings that you will likely only set once.

Setting	Description
Enable Reward Points Program	This is unchecked by default.  Once you enable the reward points program, your customers will instantly begin to see their accrual and redemption options in checkout, receipts, and their order history.
Able to Redeem Reward Points Against User Supplied Price Products	User supplied price (USP) products are mostly used for donation-style products. As a result, this setting is disabled by default.  If your store uses USP products for other purposes, you might want to consider allowing points to be used to purchase a USP product.
Issue Reward Points for User Supplied Price Products	User supplied price (USP) products are mostly used for donation-style products. As a result, this setting is disabled by default.  If your store uses USP products for other purposes, you might want to consider allowing points to be accrued by a customer when purchasing a USP product.
Unused Points Issued	These are points that haven't yet been "spent" in your store.  These points could be redeemed at any time.  The points you see here will be displayed by the total points and cash value.
Points Reserved for Orders	These are points that are currently being applied to orders that haven't yet been processed.  This will generally always be zero in stores that instantly capture funds.  The points you see here will be displayed by the total points and cash value.

How Customers See Reward Points

Once you enable reward points, customers will begin to see their current reward point balance shown to them anytime that they're on the order history view.

If the customer has any reward points to spend, they'll see their points as an available payment option during checkout.  It's possible that they could partially or even fully pay for an order with reward points, if they have enough of them.

When your customers receive their receipts in e-mail or view them on your site and in their order history, they'll see how many points they spent towards an order.