Rewards Program Accuracy

[koryb1]

Has anyone else had concerns that the Rewards Program feature does not add up earned rewards accurately?

From time to time I see unusual customer rewards balances. I typically just update the balance after doing a manual tally of their orders, but another one popped up today that is so simple and straightforward that it just has me more worried of an underlying issue.

Our program is a "Buy 10 Pairs of Shoes, Get 1 Pair Free" setup. This particular customer has purchased just 1 pair of shoes from us, yet when I look at her rewards balance it is showing credit for 2 pairs. How could this be?

Thanks in advance.

[degcolosimo]

Yes, I also have this problem. It is not giving my customers rewards credit for their purchases, so I always have to go in and manually change the points earned. PLUS, when I try and add a new product to the rewards, it won't work at all.

Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening?

THanks

[Jim]

@koryb1 We haven't had reports of problems with rewards quantities from other merchant. Do you have exact steps that you can use to recreate the problem of getting credit for more products than they have purchased?

@degcolosimo On the issue of customers not being credited for a purchase does your store force them to login in order to purchase? If they make a purchase without being logged in it will not be credited to their reward count.
What do you mean do you mean by "it won't work at all"? What doesn't work? Exact steps of what you are trying to do would be helpful.

[koryb1]

Thanks Jim for the reply. The easiest example I can give is a customer who has only placed one order from us (ever), which included 1 qualifying item. Yet when I looked at her rewards balance it was 2. I have since corrected her balance so I don't think we can go back and look at it again. But on other occasions I have seen similar activity.

It would be extremely helpful if we could see more granular data. The rewards balance is obviously calculated somehow, yet the ability for us to see the balance detail doesn't exist. The data is in there, so it seems logical to offer reports that we could view showing us what orders are included in the total.

Related, nowhere can I generate a report showing the rewards balances for all customers. We can look them up individually, so why not allow a report listing all customers' current balances. This would be a huge tool for marketing. I could generate a report identifying which customers need to purchase 1-2 more items to earn the free reward, and then use that data to generate an email campaign to those customers ("Buy just 2 more X to earn a free Y") which is sure to be successful.

As it is now, the rewards balances are a black box. I can see what ShopSite tells me they should be, yet I have no way of knowing how they are calculated so that when they vary from what our records show I can't reconcile the difference.

I understand that when customers don't log in they won't get credit; this often happens and their balance is understandably low. But when the balance is higher than I think it should be this causes concern.

Another big problem is that customers can log into their account using one email address and name, but then place their order using a different email address and name (this happens with PayPal payments for example). Who knows, maybe this is why the balance was 2 instead of 1 in my first example; maybe she bought the second item for a different person and just used all their contact info. There is no way to know.

Further, if a customer that logs in with one address and orders with a different address later returns an item, when I go to manually lower their rewards balance, I can't always find their rewards account. So in these instances customers are buying/returning products but still getting credit in their rewards account as I can't find them to manually lower the balance. Maybe (I haven't tried it to know) deleting their order would also lower the balance, but I don't really want to do that as I prefer not to delete order data and that wouldn't work anyway for customers who only return a portion of the order (and not the whole order so why delete).

So, we really need to see more data. I should be able to look up a customer account and see their order history and also their rewards balance history. I should also be able to find a customer (Customer Registration) through a search by Order Number.

I love ShopSite, but we have tons of customers with rewards balances, and not being confident that they're all 100% accurate, and not being able to see the data behind the balances makes me very nervous. Again the data is in there somewhere, so please offer more tools for us to access it.

Thanks again,

Kory

[loren_d_c]

Download the customer in tab-delimited format and see what's in the 'Number Of Purchases' column. This could at least tell you if this account had placed more than one order. If they have, then they may have used a friend's email address, or they could have just changed their account's email address between orders.

-Loren

[koryb1]

Thanks for the suggestion Loren. The resulting download shows just one order for this customer. The order total in the report also matched the one order I was aware of. It included just one qualifying item (and not much else of anything really, it wasn't a big order) yet the rewards balance was 2.

Take care,

Kory