Smile: Loyalty Program Rewards

It was really helpful to have Erin assist and guide me with solving different technical problems and how to integrate work flow with Smile~ Erin provides detailed and thoughtful assistance and asking the right questions to help me. Really appreciate it!

Just that I find Smile system does have a lot of improvement to make, for example customer reminder emails should have more built in customisable functions eg description text space, and more criteria provided to create VIP tier settings (example not only based on customers' purchase amount / points earned, but also specific order numbers, duration, etc) also the bonus campaign is only limited when there is one "earn points by making a purchase method", so now if we got more than one way, we are not allowed to use the bonus campaign unless we pause them. So i find it not friendly enough despite of the fee we are paying for this system.

I am giving Smile: Loyalty and Rewards a 3 star rating as the program is inefficient and complicated. However, I have been communicating with Cole Breivik and have been happy with his responsiveness and assistance.

We used the Smile Rewards app for about 4 years and it does what it says. No complaining about that. In these 4 years we hade some steep price hikes releated to what each abo tier can do. Initially the free tier had no order limits. You got less possibilities, but you did not pay. Then the next tier was 29 Dollars if I remember right. Now it's 49 Dollars with a limit of 500 monthly orders and if you overstep by 1 order you aren't able to access your clients data anymore. The only way is to pay the next tier (199 Dollar, great scaling btw) or to wait the next month and hope the order quantity goes down again. We found a great alternative with less money and more features.

The app is great and I would give it 5 stars if it didnt have 1 glitch that they still have not fixed... If you use their referral program, there is NO way to prevent fraud. So that means, customers can create multiple emails and get the referral discount without ever being blocked. So customers are repeatedly using a referral discount on every order without the app stopping it or blocking it. So in the end, you end up losing more money than making money from the referrals. But the rewards portion part works great and has no issues!

It's a good enough software for what it does, but god help you if you forget that you're being billed and ask for a refund since you stopped using the service. Totally my fault, but yeah, just a reminder that always double check your monthly charges every month so you don't have to ask for a refund and get turned down.

The app is pretty fine, easy enough to use and customize. We really liked it for a while.
HOWEVER, we realized that when our customers click the button to earn points for certain tasks (ie follow us on insta, or like our fb page) smile IMMEDIATELY rewards the reward points, upon clicking the button.
I was testing it out and got a reward point email from them before the new browser with our instagram was even done loading.
I reached out to support and they explained due to certain laws there is no way for them to verify if users actually follow through with the actions, but they believe that most people do.
Alright, thats totally fine, but can you please implement a delay in sending the email/ awarding the points? like a 5 or 10m delay in that email being sent would give the individual a moment to actually go ahead and follow through, and they are WAY more likely to do it that way.

Update: I was able to deactivate the auto email, while this is better than nothing, it would be great if they could introduce a delay option!

We have used this review since setting up our online store 3 years ago. At this point we will be looking at changing our loyalty point program. Anything less than Pro is not worth the money, and the subscription fees are out of control. We are frustrated with the lack of features in any payment plan other than Pro. We would happily pay a reasonable subscription fee for the app, but the Pro is an insane amount of money to pay for a mid-sized business, and the features in Starter or Growth are not worth it. I would recommend against other small/medium sized businesses using this app. I am glad the developers have found success with enterprise level businesses but they do not care or cater to anyone else.

Confusing at first but once you use it you can pick it up

The free tier has been great to get us going, but the prices jump steeply if you wish to upgrade features. The features we need are in the $199 a month tier, which is quite steep for what we are. Our customers are saying they never knew we had a loyalty program, we wish it was a little more obvious than a star at the bottom of our homepage. Hunting around for a similar program with more small business friendly pricing. (Not every business is a startup with crazy amounts of capital trying to scale up in ridiculous amounts of time )

This app has great promise, but it really lacks in power features.

Like you cant reward a customer with a free product from a collection. It has to be a specific product. So if you have many designs of the same product (our example is mousepads), you have to choose a single one for the customers to get for free. You cant just give them a free mousepad and let them choose any any of them. I have to choose one single design that they have to get for free. So if you sell out of that specific design, tough luck, you now have to keep changing it in the system. Also the customer has no choice even though, to them, they see the product as being the same cost and dont understand why they cant choose their free mousepad. You cant even select multiple products which would seem like the compromise.

Another example is you cant edit the promo code it creates for rewards to have a maximum amount. So i cant setup a promo code to be 10% off up to $100. Its just 10% an unlimited amount. So if someone makes a purchase for $10,000 they can get $1,000 off with no maximum.

There are many little things like this in Smile that really bug me which keep it from really being great. I will edit my rating if some of these things were changed / added. Specifically the free collection thing.

I dont know if this is a limit of shopify or not, and this does not count towards my review, but i wish Amount Off coupons could count towards shipping. If a customer has a $20 off coupon and they buy a $15 product they has $7 shipping for a total of$22, they can only get $15 off even though their purchase is over $20.

Also i would LOVE to be able to actually link customers to the rewards. There is not way to actually link customers to see the rewards. I have to tell them to manually open the widget at the bottom of the page.