Early access to store credit on Shopify is here! Gone are the times of using gift cards and discount codes as workarounds—you possibly can now issue store credit directly in your Shopify admin. Store credit early access is out there with a limited feature set and accessible to all Shopify businesses globally.
Use recent store credit features to assist you to create more flexibility in customer interactions, improve operational efficiency, and help prevent lost sales.
What’s store credit?
Store credit is monetary value given to your customer or potential customer to spend in your store. Unlike gift cards or discount codes, store credit isn’t transferable and is linked on to the client to whom it’s issued, either with or without an expiration date.
In Shopify’s early access release, store credit could be viewed, credited, and debited directly from a customer profile, and logged in customers can decide to spend their store credit at checkout.
What are the advantages of using store credit?
Utilizing store credit helps create loyal customers, which is vital to the long-term growth of what you are promoting. While repeat customers account for less than 21% of shoppers, they generate 44% of revenue and 46% of orders. And so they cost less to accumulate too: acquiring recent customers costs five times as much because it costs to retain existing customers.
Offering store credit to customers creates more flexibility in your customer interactions, improves operational efficiency, and helps drive customer retention, loyalty, and sales.
Encourage customer retention and increase sales
Store credit incentivizes customers to come back back to your shop. If included as an element of a rewards or loyalty program, store credit could be used as a tool to precise your appreciation to customers for his or her repeat business.
Customers often find yourself spending extra money than the balance of store credit issued. For instance, if a customer is issued $20 in store credit, they’re prone to spend greater than $20 when redeeming that credit of their next purchase. Increasing average order value amongst returning customers is a straightforward yet effective technique to help drive customer lifetime value in the long run.
Create greater flexibility in customer interactions
Every interaction you might have with a customer is a possibility to show a one-time exchange or visit right into a lifelong customer and constant advocate in your brand. Offering store credit in your loyalty and customer support workflows, whether pre- or post-purchase, can assist construct a positive rapport and fame that results in returning business. And since store credit isn’t transferable, you possibly can ensure that store credit issued is getting used by its intended recipient.
Store credit could be offered as compensation for a poor experience, to reward customers for his or her previous purchases, and as an element of a marketing incentive or campaign that helps drive sales.
Construct a source of truth for store credit balances, orders and customers
Unlike a number of the popular workarounds to store credit, comparable to gift cards and discount codes, store credit balances and transaction history are recorded and referenceable directly in a customer’s profile. Early access also includes store credit as a payment method type in analytics and reporting throughout the Shopify admin.
Opting to introduce store credit into your workflows rather than workarounds helps increase transparency and accuracy when analyzing your customers, their behaviors, and their orders.
How store credit works
Store credit is out there to all Shopify businesses globally, with a feature set that can grow all year long.
Apply store credit at checkout
Enabling store credit at checkout gives your customers a approach to spend the shop credit that you just issue. When a customer is testing, the choice to use store credit to their order will appear after the client logs in to their customer account. A customer can log in directly from the checkout page using a one-time six-digit verification code that’s sent to their email address.
Store credit can only be accessed by customers once they are logged into recent customer accounts. Before issuing store credit to customers, you need to ensure the login experience version is ready to recent customer accounts in your Shopify admin, or that you might have provided the client with a URL that provides access to recent customer accounts. This URL could be present in your customer accounts settings, even when the version of login experience is ready to classic customer accounts or if you might have no logged in experience in any respect.
Issue store credit directly out of your Shopify admin
Store credit could be credited and debited directly from a customer’s profile, where you may as well see store credit balances that a customer is currently holding in a number of currencies.
When issuing store credit, you possibly can enter the quantity to credit, and whether or not the credit expires on a specified date. Store credit could be manually deducted from a customer profile by debiting the balance. Any spend by the client, or any manual debit, might be applied to the soonest expiring credits first. After a credit or debit is actioned, the change in the client’s store credit balance will appear as a timeline event on the client’s profile. When a customer spends store credit at checkout, it’s reflected within the order timeline.
Track and analyze store credit
Understanding how much outstanding store credit you might have issued to customers in addition to with the ability to understand how and when store credit is redeemed can assist you to strategize for the long run.
By choosing a store credit balance on a customer’s profile in a specified currency, you’re capable of view all of the transactions which have taken place in relation to that store credit balance. This includes the present balance, detailed transaction history, and the amounts which can be as a consequence of expire.
More on the horizon
Store credit on Shopify is currently in early access. By the tip of this yr, we’ll introduce recent functionality, including:
- The flexibility to issue store credit in lieu of a refund, to scale back the quantity of returns your team has to handle, keep money flowing to what you are promoting, and improve customer retention
- Improved evaluation for store credit, the power to assign reason codes for reporting purposes, and shop-level reports for balance and liability
- Segments, triggers, and automatic workflows that assist you to goal customers with store credit, robotically issue store credit as incentives, notify customers of expiring store credit, and more
Tricks to get essentially the most out of store credit
Get creative with store credit
Store credit isn’t only for rectifying customer support issues or driving customer loyalty; it could even be used to assist acquire recent customers and increase your brand’s awareness. From referral programs that incentivize previous customers to recommend your products to their family and friends to offering store credit to your employees as a perk of the job, store credit is a flexible tool for what you are promoting.
Cross-sell and upsell using the Customer API
Trying to improve and diversify your marketing campaigns? Using the Customer Accounts API, you possibly can discover a customer’s store credit balance, making it easy to send engaging and personalized marketing communications to customers who hold store credit.
Start with store credit today
Start winning back customers and constructing brand loyalty. Issue store credit using Shopify’s early access features, directly out of your Shopify admin. To learn more about easy methods to start issuing store credit today, visit our Help Center.
