Introduction
There may be occasions where a customer reaches out and notifies you that they did not earn points. This FAQ will help to determine the cause of the customer not earning points for a transaction when they should have.
Overview
Program Participation
Check in your Settings > Program Participants to see what customer types you are allowing to earn points. If you only allow account holders to earn points - you'll want to check if the customer who did not earn points is a Member or Guest.
Guests are full of potential to become Program Members, but have not yet signed up with an email and password to join your Program. For this reason, Guests are not able to earn points.
If you see a customer appended with the Guest title, that means they are not in your Program yet and cannot earn points.
If you allow guests to earn points (this is based on your program participation settings), all customers (including customers who do not have accounts) should be able to earn points on their orders, refer their friends to your store, and earn VIP perks.
✅ This feature is only available for merchants on Shopify and Wix
What about sign up points?
Sign up points are a great way of welcoming new Program Members to your store. These points are awarded when a brand new customer signs up at your store once Smile is installed. These points are to encourage engagement with new people! Sign up points will not be awarded to existing Program Members who had accounts prior to the launch of your Rewards Program.
📋 Note - if you're using Shopify's new customer accounts, your customers will not be able to earn sign up points.
My customer made a purchase on my in store POS, but they didn't get points
If you have a customer wondering why they haven't earned points on POS despite following the proper protocol, it might be worth checking out your Settings > Platform > Order Settings to see if you have the program set to allow points for both online and POS orders. You'll also want to make sure that the customer has provided an email address in order for them to earn points for their POS purchase.
Order status issue
In order to earn points, your customers' order status needs to match the status you have set to award points in Settings > Platform > Order Settings (in most cases, for Shopify & WIX merchants - you'll want to mark the order as 'Paid'; for BigCommerce merchants - you'll want to mark the order as 'Shipped' or 'Completed'),
I checked all of those things, and my customer still didn't earn points.
It's always best practice to take a look at your earning and spending rules and ensure that they are enabled. If a rule is disabled, then the customer will not be able to earn points for completing the action associated with that rule.
It's also worth checking to see if there are any earning conditions set up that may be unintentionally blocking your customers from earning points for that rule. This is a feature available on our paid plan.
What's next?
Contact the Smile team
Learn more