Sharing Customer Points Across Multiple Stores (Multi-store)

If you are a merchant with multiple stores, you can set your loyalty program to share your customers’ points across all of them. This means your customers can use the points they earned in all of your stores combined, and redeem them for rewards in any one of your stores. 

A customer who usually shops and earns points in one of your stores, is more likely to go to another one of your stores rather than somewhere else, because they can redeem their points there.

Improve customer experience by using this functionality to support multi-geo stores, as well as help expose your customers to new stores under the same organization and increase cross-brand purchases.

Merging stores into a group

To give customers access to a shared points balance across your stores, you will need to merge your stores into a group. A group is defined as two or more stores under the same organization that share some of the same loyalty program customer attributes.

The following customer attributes are shared across your stores on a group level:

• Email address - the unique identifier used by our system to allow one customer to earn and spend a shared points balance across the group.
• Current points balance - the combined sum of all points customers currently have available to use across the group.
• Total points earned - the combined sum of all points earned over time across the group.
• Birthday - customers’ date of birth is collected one time in one of the stores in the group, and can be used by all birthday campaigns.
• Last seen - a date that changes based on the last action a customer took in any one of the stores in the group. 
• Exclude from reports - excludes customers from being included in reports and dashboards from all stores across the group.

Limitations

• Points expiration based on 'date earned' logic is not supported for Multi-store
• All other aspects of your loyalty program including campaigns, rewards, VIP tiers, referrals, reports, etc. are store-specific, and cannot be shared across stores in the group
• If you are connecting the same ESP account for all of the stores in the group, store-specific customer attributes (e.g. referred_by) will be overwritten by any of the other stores
• Analytics and reporting don't include multi-store information, meaning that each dashboard or report will only show data that is relevant to the store that it's presented on. The only exclusion is the Points Overview dashboard.

Viewing your customers’ shared history

The points balance for customers can be shared across all of your stores, and viewed together in the Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals admin.

Merchant’s customer history view

When you view a customer’s profile in the Loyalty & Referrals admin of any of your stores, you can see the combined history from all stores in the group. 

To view your customers’ shared history, do the following:

1. Using the menu on the left, go to the Customers page, then click on a customer’s profile. 
2. For each row in a customer’s history, you can see which store an event occurred in under the Store column. 
3. You can filter these sections by store or view them all by choosing from the drop-down menu on the top next to Show data of.

Shopper’s reward history view

Shoppers can view their actions and rewards history from all of your stores combined whenever they log into any one of your stores’ rewards page on-site module. The Store column in their Rewards History displays which store a specific action or reward is associated with.

Points Overview dashboard

The data that appears in your Points Overview dashboard is aggregated at the group level and is presented the same across all of your stores in that group.

Combined points expiration

When using the loyalty points expiration feature, the settings that you apply to one store will apply to all the other stores in the group. The points expiration will be determined by the shared Last seen date.

For example, if you set customers’ points to expire 3 months after the last date of activity in store A, and a customer recently performed an action in store B, that customer’s points will be reset to expire 3 months following the action performed in store B.

Collecting one birthday across all stores

Customers only need to provide their birthday one time in one store. It will then appear as completed in all other stores in the group. This will help create a more seamless experience for your customers.

To enable the collection of one birthday across a group of stores, do the following:

1. In your Earning Points Module click Create, then select Collect Birthday under Multistore Campaigns to add it to your module.
   
2. Repeat step 1 for each of the stores in the group.
3. Customers will be asked to enter their date of birth one time in one store. After this, the Collect Birthday tile in their rewards page will automatically appear as completed in all of your stores.
   

What customers get on their birthday

You can decide if on a customer’s birthday, they will receive one combined reward from all of the stores in your group, or separate rewards from each store. 

Best practices

When merging stores into a group, there are some best practices to keep in mind.

Loyalty Opt-in

To ensure a consistent experience for your customers across the different stores in a group, customers will need to use the same email address every time they opt-in to your loyalty program in a different store. This is how our system will know to recognize them as the same customer across all stores and associate their activity with a shared points balance.

Adjusting non purchase-based campaigns

If you allow customers to share points across your stores, we recommend that you adjust some of your non purchase-based campaigns, such as Create an Account, Facebook Share, Page visit, etc. This will prevent customers from earning a large number of points across your stores and redeeming them for discounts, without making a purchase. 

VIP tiers

Loyalty VIP tiers are store-specific, meaning that each store will have its own separate VIP tiers program that is not shared across groups. In this case, even though customers’ points balance is shared across the group, the Points Earned towards your customers’ VIP tier status are not.