Smile: Loyalty Rewards Program

The loyalty and referral programs are great, and their support is fantastic! Mackenzie was really prompt in answering all our queries. EDIT: 2022-01-14
After using Smile for a few months, I've reduced our ratings to 2 stars. Two of our biggest complaints are: 1. Terrible UX for discount code redemption: The user "applies" a discount code on the cart page via the Smile nudge, but there is no user visible feedback whatsoever that the code has been applied. About 75% of our customers that create discount codes don't actually end up redeeming them because of this, and we think our conversion rates have actually *reduced*. Our tech team spent significant amount of time trying to fix this on our end, but because Smile runs within an "iframe" there is absolutely nothing you can do. Be prepared for customer complaints that their points redemption isn't working. 2. Mediocre functionality to handle customer refund abuse: A customer can place an order, redeem their earned points and then return their original order. Effectively, they've gotten "free" points. There's nothing you can do to address this, other than manually inspect the points dashboard in Smile and address these cases. Not at all feasible if you deal with a large quantity of orders and operate on thin margins. There are easy tech solutions to this (e.g. Smile could let us delay awarding points by x days), but Smile doesn't support them. Unfortunately we can't really disable the program once we've launched it without aggravating our loyal customers. So we're stuck dealing with these issues while we look for an alternate program to migrate to. Regardless of the app issues, their support team is stellar in their responsiveness.

While this app is easy to set up and use, for $49 a month - which is NOT CHEAP - id like to be able to at least gain some deeper analytics that what is currently received - which is almost nothing. Only once were we offered able to offer to our customers a promotion to "double their points" and when i enquired re running this special again, was told it was only offered based on algorithms? i have not seen it since and that was around a year ago. It does not give me incentive to upgrade the account to a more expensive plan and will be looking at alternative apps this year. I would not recommend this app to other business's based solely on the lack of analytics available.

The app sent a prompt asking for a review so I obliged.
This app is HORENDOUSLY priced. Yes, there are other options you can use for your store and pay WAY less which I do but I am so disgusted by the sheer audacity of the creators to charge what they do for the most basic of things. There are 3 plans - One for $49 a month, one for $200 a month...Yes, TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS every single MONTH and the last one for $600 monthly. Their free plan is simple and will be enough to get you started with a loyalty program. You won't be able to customize anything about it or add any of your own branding but it will be enough to get going.

Slows down my store considerably. My SEO/site manager tells me to remove it every month. Very glitchy, I can barely access the dashboard most days. Disappointing considering the number of good reviews it has. I wouldn't recommend it.

Final Update: I have given them one star, because even though they didnt know I was leaving they responded quicker. It seems though there were so many people I had to deal with to get a good answer. It was much better when the owner was assisting and even called me after my review. After I was customer he never responded to me every again; AND that alone is worth taking away oooooo about all the stars. So if you are looking for just an online option there are other better loyalty programs out there; this was is a bit pricey as mentioned by other reviewers.

Another Update: So I have been emailing them for the past week with 0 responses from Eli or Steve. 0. How do you expect to run a company successfully if you dont even fulfill your end of the bargain. You said by the end of August will be the feature of having multiple coupons (for different collections) so the customers dont get confused. Guess what....NOPE. Now im hearing later in Sept. I have customers pissed because my old loyalty system I offered them coupons for a certain collection at a lower rate. I cant do this now because the names are the same. Extremely agitated at this company. 1 star!

Update: Ok so here I AM AGAIN, AGAIN with the same problem. I speak to an Eli and i keep being told that things are being worked on. How do you expect someone to go to enterprise if you dont do anything for the people even on the middle plan? I HAVE been asking TO CHANGE THE NAME of the coupons that have the same type style $10 off for X amount of points says the same thing for certain collections with $10 off. Its misleading to customers. I AM VERY upset with this application. Something so simple ive been asking for, and they arrent doing anything about it. NOTHING. The only reason why I am giving them a second star and third star is because they app is good if you want very very very very basic coupons. Let me know that Steve spoke to me on the phone and cleared it up this is officially being worked on.

Update: So here we are again, first off let me say they didnt fix the coupon issue; and its been several days. I ported over from SLOYALTY so when they issued points they did online and in store but people could only use it online. So there were people getting coupons they already used in store, this isnt ST fault its mine for not checking. However, I will say this. THEY need to make a back end where it lists the people not with just 10 entries and have to go thru pages. Should be sortable and more options to see on the screen. Also why is the coupon NAME still not fixed? This could be so easily fixed.

Another issue is I wanted to remove AppCard and go full blown with ST but I cant because even though it says custom reward system you cannot do multiple locations, so I cant remove my point system for in store. Shame too cause they would be getting 400 a month from me. Also another issue I have is with the COUPON names, didnt I mention this already? Such a huge big deal. Also the next issue we have is that if THEY ISSUE the coupon they should be able to set an X amount of time before issuing another. People can take advantage of the system by doing this over and over. I mean you earned it, you earned it right? You shouldnt be able to do 10 orders back to back with coupons. Set a time limit, x amount of coupons before X amount of day. Once the coupon name gets fixed ill fix thsi rating

Update: Ok so only one issue; they added smart collections but when you create a coupon that has same name then it shows as the other coupons. This is the only gripe I have with the coupon names. Be cool if they added DAILY options of sharing but the REVIEWS part is really really cool.

Ok so this is going to be a pretty through review. First off I am coming from SLoyalty for a multitude of reasons. The biggest reason is sloyalty although cheap is NOT an option if you have a POS. People will double dip and SLoyalty instead of fixing it chose to tell me ohwell or goodbye in so many words.

So here we go, Sweet Tooth has a good amount of configurations. A lot of sharing features, needs to add Pinterest and tumblr, and the sharing of the tweet shouldnt be a one time thing. Should be every 3 days or something. I get the follow being a one time thing just not the sharing part.

A huge one star take away is the option of CSS on the actual pop up AND the fact it doesnt show the points people have in the tab. The tab is very configurable if you have some CSS knowledge. Love that. I do NOT like that you cant change any verbage or the color of some of the CSS on the backend via stylesheets. I can ONLY use the fonts they choose for the pop up. Not a bad deal but it could be improved. Also another improvement is I should be able to select smart collections. Silly NOT to have this.

Customer support is FAST. Very. I am only going to use it for online but for both options its great.

it wont let customers make a account, it force closes

Too Expensive, they charging 60 USD for nothing even they are not allowing to add points automiatcally, will be canceling their subscription...

I just started setting up smile and already have a few hesitations. The photos are required to be such a large size 1200 x 480 that they look very unprofessional in an email because the text in a 600 pixel frame. So you have to scroll in to get the full text cutting off the photo. The argument is they just changed it to the 1200 pixel size in order to give a better quality photo. You can get a great quality photo at 300 dpi. I won't be using the photo which is extremely disappointing!

Also, one of the reasons I choose to go with the Growth program was the ability to have control over the collections the customer can use the rewards on. But we have multiple collections. I want customers to be able to use their rewards on more than one collection, however, I can only choose one or all. I want to be able to restrict one. Why? This is not control, no one has just a couple of collections.

I'm going to try it out, but very skeptical at this point.

The app seems fairly easy to use but I noticed that rewarding someone for "sharing" on social media is pointless. It only requires them to click on the "share to facebook" or whatever and does not actually require the person to share. Its a way to rack up false points.

This app could be great with a few modifications.

1. The launcher icon is obtrusive and is on every screen of every page. There needs to be an option to choose what pages it displays on and for how long or have the "X" icon that will let customers dismiss it so its no longer on the screen.
2. There needs top be a way to disable the launcher button, but still allow customers to sign up and view/redeem rewards using a link or web address instead. It needs a link that can be set to a landing page instead of the launcher widget.
3. If the widget is set to the right side of the screen, my customers can't checkout because the launcher widget stays on top blocking the checkout button.