Testing your Loyalty Program on Shopify

Experience your site as a shopper without exposing any loyalty or referral elements to your customers.

You can see your shop through a shopper’s eyes with the help of a Customer Preview flow that guides you through curated flows.

How it works

Existing merchants can choose to change or update their settings at any time. If you want to test out these updates, you can pause your program and use the Shopper Preview to view your changes live on-site.

You will see a guided shopper flow on your live site that will help you understand how shoppers will experience your loyalty and referrals programs.

You will be directed to a page with a special link that can only be accessed through Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals and is not accessible to any of your customers.

Test Customer

As a first step, you will need to create a test customer account. This is a fake customer that is created by you to test the Loyalty program before and after launching it.

A test customer is a customer who has a “+yotpotest” suffix in the email address’s username, before the “@”. For example, johnsmith+yotpotest@gmail.com.

To learn what a test customer is and how it works, go to Creating a Loyalty Test Customer.

On-site modules

When the program is in Onboarding or Paused modes, you will not see the modules in the live theme, unless you are using the Customer Preview link.

Once the program is set to Active, the modules will be available to all your customers to engage with.

To learn more about activating your program, go to Activating & Pausing Your Loyalty Program.

Accessing the Customer Preview

To access the guided flow from your Yotpo Loyalty & Referrals, go to Set Up Program > Customer Preview.

Once you click the Preview program button, you will be taken to your Rewards Page using a special link that makes Yotpo’s modules and customer preview widget visible to you and you alone. 

You will also the preview guide that will help you complete key loyalty flows to test your program.

Customer Preview guide

The guide will appear in the bottom left corner of your screen. You can see all the guide elements and buttons below:

The guide indicates whether you’re viewing a page as a logged-out customer or a logged-in customer. If you’re logged in, you will also see the email address of the logged-in user

You will be guided through the following customer flows:

Flow 1: Signing up

Reviewing your rewards page

Scroll through your rewards page as a signed-out customer. You can see that all the relevant loyalty elements appear in it and there are no issues with the design.

If you spot anything you’d like to change, go to the Rewards Page instance you’ve published on-site and make the relevant changes.

To learn more about updating your Reward Page, go to Creating a Rewards Page.

Creating a test account

The next step is to experience your rewards page and loyalty program as a signed-in customer - Click on the relevant button on your rewards page to create a loyalty test account. The guide will show you how to configure your email address so that you will receive all the relevant triggered emails the customer will receive.

To learn more about the test customer, go to Creating a Loyalty Test Customer.

Once you’ve created the account, you will see that the ‘Viewing as’ section of the guide changed to reflect your test account email address.

Go back to your rewards page and continue the testing flow.

Checking rewards history

Now we want to confirm that the Customer Account earning rule is working by checking that the completed earning rule has been added to the ‘Rewards history’ section of the rewards page.

Click on Rewards history and check if the completed earning rule appears there.

Completing social-based earning rules

In the final step of the flow, you are prompted to complete social based earning rules.

Once you complete an earning rule, you should go back to the Rewards history section of your on-site rewards page and confirm that you have indeed received a reward for completing the earning rule.

If everything seems to be set up correctly but you still haven’t received anything, please reach out to your Yotpo Account Manager.

Flow 2: Completing a test purchase

In this flow, you’ll go through the process of completing a purchase and receiving a reward. If you have purchase-based VIP tiers, you will also check if you can gain an upgraded VIP tier status.

You can submit a number within the guide and it will automatically create a test purchase for your user. We recommend using a high number so that you’ll have enough points to later test your on-site redemption action and get you into an upgraded VIP tier.

Once the purchase was submitted, refresh the rewards page and see if you’ve earned points for completing a purchase as part of the Points for Purchases earning rule, and whether you’ve upgraded your VIP tier status.

You should also go to the VIP tier status section and verify the tier status was updated.

If there was an issue with receiving the rewards or VIP tier status, please check your Loyalty & Referral Points for Purchases and VIP Tiers settings.

If the settings are correct and the issue persists. Please reach out to your Yotpo Account Manager.

Flow 3: Redeeming points for rewards

In this flow, you’ll go through the process of redeeming your points for rewards at checkout or from your rewards page.

The points redemption flow varies according to where it’s available in your store. It can be implemented in the Rewards Page, at checkout, or on both.

Follow the process relevant to what you have implemented on-site to test the flow:

▪️️ If you have Rewards at Checkout

1. Add any product/s to your cart.

2. Go to the checkout page and select a reward from the dropdown.

3. Click Apply and see that the purchase amount has been reduced accordingly.

4. Return to the rewards page and finish the Customer Preview flow.

▪️ ️If you allow redeeming from your Rewards Page

1. Redeem points from the redeem section of your rewards page and copy the reward code.

2. Add any product to your cart.

3. Paste your code at checkout and click Apply and see that the purchase amount has been reduced accordingly.

4. Return to the rewards page and finish the Customer Preview flow.

Troubleshooting

If for any reason you weren't able to redeem your points and receive a discount, check the following:

1. You don't have enough points - you can repeat flow #2 and complete a test purchase to get more points.

2. You aren’t logged in - log into the test account you created in flow #1.

3. You aren’t logged in as a test account. Make sure you log into the test account you created in flow #1.

4. Another reward is already applied - rewards and discounts can’t be stacked. Make sure there isn’t another discount already applied at checkout.

5. The reward setting interferes with the checkout - makes this redemption eligible, for example, if there's a minimum spend required for the reward and you haven’t reached it.

Next steps

After finishing all the flows, you can go back to the relevant section of Yotpo Loyalty& Referrals and change or update settings or designs that were problematic.

Once you feel your program is ready, you can go ahead and activate it. You can monitor the performance of your programs in the Analytics section of Loyalty & Referrals.