Most articles on Shopify Loyalty apps compete on feature-list length, and the list tells you almost nothing about whether customers will come back. The features that change customer behavior are a small subset of the features being sold, and they price very differently across apps.
So I ranked the most important Shopify loyalty features by how directly they can influence repeat purchases, redemption, and customer behavior. Redemption placement comes first, followed by earning options, referrals, VIP tiers, memberships, campaigns, POS, segmentation, and analytics.
For each feature, you'll see what it does, which stores benefit from it, examples from Shopify merchants, and the lowest published monthly price at which six popular loyalty apps offer it.
Where customers redeem drives the most repeat purchases, since every extra step between a customer and their reward costs you redemption, and redemption is what brings customers back.
A points program gives customers points on every order, which they spend on discounts, free products, or store credit. You set the earning rate and what points buy.
Best for: any store with repeat purchases, which makes this the feature every program starts from.
Why it matters: points give customers a reason to come back to you rather than to whoever ranks first next time. The earning rate is yours to set against your margin, so the cost scales with what customers spend.
Example: Agradi awards 5 points per €1 spent and lets customers redeem for free branded products. Biscuiteers gives £1 in points per £10 spent, capped at £10 per order, chosen so customers could understand it instantly.
Best app for points: Love Loyalty, at $12/mo. Points, referrals, product page placements, and POS all come with the cheapest paid plan, where LoyaltyLion and Yotpo charge $199 for the same four.
Cart redemption lets customers spend points in one step while they check out, without leaving for a rewards page.
Best for: stores where redemption rates are low despite decent signup numbers.
Why it matters: every step between a customer and their reward costs you redemption. Cart redemption puts the reward at the moment of purchase rather than asking customers to plan ahead.
Example: Agradi reached 47% point redemption and 17% of sales from loyalty after adding in-cart 1-click redemption alongside product page and account page placements. The app they used before took too many steps to redeem.
"The first solution we tried was super static, it took too many steps for customers to redeem their points for rewards which had a negative impact on conversion." — Andries Wesselingh, Data Manager & Website Lead at Agradi
Best app for cart redemption: Love Loyalty, at $12/mo, with redemption in two steps. Joy charges $129 and Growave charges $199 for the same feature, and Smile.io, LoyaltyLion, and Yotpo don't list cart redemption at all.
A product page widget shows customers what an item earns before they add it to the cart, which raises what the order is worth to them while they're still deciding.
Best for: stores where customers don't know the program exists.
Why it matters: showing points before purchase raises the value of the order in the customer's head at the moment they're deciding. It also does the job a popup does, without interrupting anyone.
Example: Agradi and Swederm both run product page placements. Swederm reached 11.4% redemption with 11% of total sales in its first two months.
Best app for product page points: Love Loyalty, at $12/mo. LoyaltyLion lists product page points above its entry plan on a quoted tier, and the other four don't list the placement.
Bonus actions pay customers points for writing reviews, following you, or sharing, so they have a reason to engage between orders.
Best for: stores that want more contact with customers between orders.
Why it matters: purchase-only earning gives a customer one reason to think about you per order. Every added action is another touchpoint, and none of them cost you anything until a customer redeems.
Example: Swederm gives 100 points for an Instagram follow and 50 as a birthday gift, and Biscuiteers gives £5 in points for leaving a review.
Best app for review-led earning: Yotpo, at $199/mo, since loyalty and reviews sit in the same product and customers earn for photo and video reviews as well as written ones.
Love Loyalty also rewards reviews, likes, comments through its Judge.me, Okendo, Loox, and Stamped integrations from $12/mo.
Custom earning rules pay points for behavior you define, such as product views or completing a quiz, so you reward the actions that predict a purchase in your store.
Best for: stores with a specific behavior worth encouraging that no template covers.
Why it matters: the useful earning actions are the ones that tell you something about the customer. Biscuiteers give £5 in points for adding three occasion reminders, so the customer tells the brand when their next gifting date is and Biscuiteers gets a reason to contact them before it.
Best app for custom earning rules: Love Loyalty, at $12/mo, and the only app here that lists custom on-site actions in its plan comparison.
A referral program turns existing customers into a channel, rewarding both sides when the referral converts.
Best for: stores with satisfied customers and expensive paid acquisition.
Why it matters: referrals bring customers who already have a reason to trust you, and they cost nothing until a referral converts. Two-sided rewards matter, since a one-sided reward asks your existing customer to do the selling for free.
Example: Swederm gives the referrer and the new customer 20 PLN each, roughly €4.60, explained on a dedicated loyalty page alongside the points system and an FAQ.
Best app for referrals: Love Loyalty, at $12/mo. Growave includes referral fraud protection from $15/mo, which is worth comparing if both sides of your referral get paid.
VIP tiers move customers up levels based on spend, with better benefits at each level.
Best for: stores where customers already buy often, since a tier nobody reaches motivates nobody.
Why it matters: tiers give heavy buyers a reason to consolidate spending with you rather than splitting it across competitors. They reward spending you were already getting, which is why they suit frequency rather than creating it.
Example: Agradi runs four tiers from Bronze to Platinum, with free items, early access, and exclusive offers at the top.
Best app for VIP tiers: Love Loyalty, at $79/mo. Joy charges $129, Smile.io and Growave charge $199, LoyaltyLion sells tiers as a paid add-on at $199, and Yotpo requires custom quotes.
A paid membership charges customers a recurring fee for always-on benefits like discounts, free shipping, and extended returns.
Best for: stores wanting to increase purchase frequency rather than reward existing frequency.
Why it matters: the customer pays up front, which changes their behavior immediately. The one-click upsell at checkout is what converts memberships, because it adds the membership to the order and applies the benefit to that same purchase. A customer seeing 10% off the order in front of them decides differently from one asked to pay $20 for future savings.
Example: Rubino sells a $20/year membership across 28 stores with 10% off every order, free shipping, free 90-day returns, and a free 180-day warranty. Members spent $630,000 in three months and spend roughly 3x non-members. Félix & Norton's members spend 180% more, on a membership giving 10% off the first order and 10% cashback afterward.
"One of our most important KPIs is re-occurrence of purchases. So the challenge was, how do we get someone who buys cookies as gifts once or twice a year to purchase on a monthly basis, even weekly?" — Simon Paquin, COO of Félix & Norton
Best app for memberships: Love Loyalty, at $79/mo, and the only app here with a one-click checkout upsell that applies member benefits to the same order. Joy lists memberships at $129/mo, and the other four don't list them.
Bonus campaigns multiply earning for a set window, like a double points weekend, so customers stock up on points during a sale and spend them after it.
Best for: stores running seasonal sales, and anyone preparing for Black Friday.
Why it matters: points earned during a sale get redeemed after it, which pulls demand into the quiet weeks that follow. Bonus points also cost less than a discount, since you pay only when the customer returns to spend them.
Best app for bonus campaigns: Love Loyalty and Smile.io, both at $79/mo. Growave charges $199, LoyaltyLion and Yotpo quote it, and Joy doesn't list campaign scheduling.
A POS integration lets staff enroll customers at the counter, with benefits working across online and in-store.
Best for: stores with physical locations, where a staff member asking in person converts better than a widget.
Why it matters: in-store enrollment reaches customers who never visit your site, and it gives you data on people you otherwise know nothing about.
Example: about 90% of Rubino's memberships sell in-store through a POS widget, with benefits live before the customer leaves. Félix & Norton connected their membership to POS to learn about regulars they previously had no data on, since most of their sales come through offline stores.
Best app for Shopify POS: Love Loyalty, at $12/mo, and the only app here that also enrolls members in a paid membership through POS. Smile.io and Growave include POS from $15/mo, and LoyaltyLion covers one location at $199.
Segmentation applies different earning and redemption rules to different groups of customers, so each group gets rewards it responds to.
Best for: stores selling to two audiences at once, such as B2B and B2C.
Why it matters: different customer types respond to different rewards, so one set of rules underpays one group and overpays the other.
Example: Ironwear sells to individual buyers and to distributor sales staff. End users want the lowest price. Distributor sales people want gift cards and personal perks. Separate rules per segment decided their choice from a requirements list running past 30 features, and their program reached 42% redemption in Q4 2025 with 28% of online sales from members.
"None of the apps provided a solution that enables us to create different loyalty program rules for different customer segments." — Shannan Currier, Digital Marketing Specialist at Ironwear
Best app for segmentation: Love Loyalty, at $79/mo, with separate earning and redemption rules per customer segment. None of the other five list per-segment rules.
Loyalty reporting tells you whether the program returned anything, through revenue attributed to loyalty, customer lifetime value, and redeemers compared against non-redeemers.
Best for: every store, though it's the feature to weight last, since reporting follows results rather than producing them.
Why it matters: the redeemer against non-redeemer comparison is what justifies spending more on placements, because it shows whether redemption itself is doing the work.
Example: Yoggies reports 66% of revenue driven by participants against 97.3% participation. High redemption reads as a cost, since every redeemed point is a discount given, and Yoggies runs 82% redemption with a 1,500-point cap per order.
Best app for reporting depth: LoyaltyLion, at $199/mo, which includes RFM segmentation, customer lifetime value, retention, and ROI reporting on every paid tier. Smile.io publishes the largest report library, from 15 up to 30+ depending on plan. Love Loyalty covers revenue attribution, CLV, and cohort comparison from $12/mo without the depth LoyaltyLion sells.
Each figure below is the lowest published monthly price that includes the feature, on any plan.
Apple and Google Wallet passes are only available at $79/mo plan on Love Loyalty and $129/mo plan on Joy.
Points, referrals, review and social earning, and Shopify POS cost $12 to $15 on four of the six apps, and $199 on LoyaltyLion and Yotpo.
A store doing 800 orders a month sits inside a $15 plan on order volume alone, then pays $199 on four of the six apps the moment VIP tiers go on the requirements list.
LoyaltyLion includes RFM segmentation, customer lifetime value, retention, and ROI reporting on every paid tier, which is deeper than what the other five publish at their entry prices. Smile.io publishes the largest report library, from 15 up to 30+ reports depending on plan.
"Not listed" means the feature doesn't appear in that app's published plan comparison. It isn't proof the feature is missing, and it's worth asking the vendor.
Love Loyalty wins eleven of the twelve features here, and the pattern behind that is worth more than the count.
Want to see how these features would work on your Shopify store? Book a demo with our founder.
Storefront placement does most of the work. Redemption in the cart, points shown on product pages, and a visible balance on the account page put the reward in front of the customer while they're deciding. Agradi added all three and reached 47%.
Not necessarily both. Tiers add value when customers already buy often enough to climb them. A store with infrequent purchases usually gets more from a membership.
Redeeming points at checkout, on three of the six apps here. Growave and Joy both require their $499/mo plan and Shopify Plus, and LoyaltyLion lists checkout redemption as Shopify Plus only on every tier. Cart redemption has no Shopify Plus requirement on any app that offers it.
Yes. Reviews, social follows and shares, profile completion, birthday submission, and custom on-site actions like product views or quiz completion can all earn points, and none of them cost you anything until a customer redeems.
No. Love Loyalty integrates with Klaviyo, Omnisend, and other email and SMS tools rather than sending its own messages, and lifecycle campaigns run through that integration.
Compare redemption rate, share of sales driven by the program, and the spending gap between members and non-members. Rubino's members spend about 3x non-members, which is the kind of gap that shows a program changing behavior rather than discounting existing behavior.
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