Smile: Loyalty Rewards Program

Reading some worrying reviews and too many without a reply, although most are positive.

Only installed the app yesterday so this might not be the best feedback (I can always update).

They would love charging you based on the number of orders but with the free plan the customers don't get to see the points on the product page, account page, checkout and post purchase. The customers are also limited in redeeming the points at the checkout.

So on one side, Smile.io would love to make more money if we generate more orders, while restricting our customers experience with their reward system and ultimately our growth and Smile's. This makes no sense.

Tout est parfait, tant au niveau des fonctionnalités que du service client. Sauf qu'au final je n'ai pas pu l'utiliser car certains éléments ne PEUVENT PAS être traduits (par exemple les boutons d'action). Cela m'a fait perdre beaucoup de temps et un peu d'argent car évidemment c'est le type de chose dont vous vous apercevez en finalisant l'app. Donc nickel tant que vous restez en anglais, sinon, passez votre chemin.

recently i suffer fm "your points redemption could not be completed, try again later", both customer and admin cannot redeem

We've been using this app for about 3 years. Overall I find the app to be missing features that I really want. My biggest sticking point is that the points are awarded right away after purchase. It would be much better from our standpoint if we could set a grace period where the points are awarded after the return policy period has ended. For example, a customer ordered several items from us and immediately redeemed her new points for a free necklace that we offer as one of the rewards. She then returned most of the order, but kept the necklace. She now has a negative points balance from her return and has not made an eligible purchase to get rid of that negative points balance. Smile does not offer a way for us to make sure the customer is keeping their purchase before they receive the points.

Another sticking point, the referral promo code link allows people to send coupons to themselves, even if they enter their own email and name that is used for their rewards. In some cases the system has caught it and "blocked" it, but only after the customer has received the promo code and used it!

Smile had a feature that excluded promo code purchases from earning points and we had been using that feature for years, until one day it was just gone. When I wrote them and asked them why they took away a feature without notice, they simply wrote back and said nobody was using it. I can assure you that's not true, because WE were using it every day. Now we have to deduct points manually for every ineligible purchase which is a real time waster for us. We also had a backlog of ineligible points that we had to go back and adjust because they did not inform us of the change. Very unprofessional. I've seen much better rewards programs than this elsewhere. We'll be phasing it out. It's more trouble than it's worth.

Very basic features for the price... Not worth the money in my opinion. The UI is easy to navigate for users but in terms of value as a merchant, the features are lacking. Point collection is simple for users but if you want to do anything to incentivize users to actually use their points, you'll need to upgrade to the $200/ month plan. With that being said, basically all of the useful features are on the $200/ month plan. If you have the budget, go for it, but to me, the value just isn't there with what you're getting compared to other apps in our tech stack. I wish we would have looked into alternative options before committing to Smile. Hard to switch at this point.

No complaints about functionality...its is a good app that works well. However, SMILE changes their pricing and packages so often that you always feel like you are being jerked around. Case in point: when they last adjusted their pricing they included VIP Tiers for what was then a reasonable monthly fee. Now, if you want to continue to offer your customer's VIP tiers, the price has been jumped to $599 a month! Talks about price gouging...

Without the more advanced features that are now only available in the upper tier, this app really doesn't have much over the others. If you are doing a million-plus a year, then maybe $7,200 a year just for your rewards program is an acceptable expense. Otherwise, it's a ridiculous amount and a shame that SMILE has resorted to greed pricing and pushed out their previous customers. So much for "Loyalty."

I have Smile.io set up to pay out rewards in levels $5, $10 & $25 but it will only pay $5 at a time and only one per purchase. Also, lately it won't connect to my POS so I end up giving the customer a $5 discount to keep them happy. Support isn't available before I go into work and I'm a small business owner with little availability during the day. There's no email address where I can send my concerns.

I have been using this app but seems the upgrade plan price is high , beyond the average rewards program. Even so, I could not send point reminder emails in the free plan thus by now it seems not doing much help for my flower business at the moment.

*Update on previous 4 star review

So it seems Smile has decided to pull back what they offer on the free plan and has pushed some of the basic features things to $199USD (not even the $49USD plan) which is dissapointing. I think pulling features back on a "sticky" product is a bit of a sneaky trick because business owners are unwilling to change an app that has lots of their customer data integrated into it. Adding new features to entice people to upgrade or pay is a much nicer way of doing things. My initial annoyance with the app still hasn't been fixed 6 months later and I still have customers wanting to include freebies on the order they just placed, which causes us issues and upsets customers, they need to fix it so that rewards get emailed to the customer after the order has been fulfilled. I'm going to start looking at a new rewards program, this one just isn't working well for us and causes me annoyance on a weekly basis.

Great app. would give 5 stars however, please please please can you reinstate reward customers when the financial status is shipped for shopify customers, instead of paid. It is causing lots of admin headaches in our company and upsetting customers. The issue is a customer makes a purchase then gets a reward email immediately then wants to bundle / redeem the reward with the order they just placed, we use a 3PL and don't get always get a chance to change the order and really its not generating return business, instead just costing us money and upsetting customers when we cant combine the order.

Great concept - easy to install
great way to entice our customers if it actually worked....our codes that get sent to customers with rewards dont actually work!