Early access to store credit on Shopify is here! Gone are the days of using gift cards and discount codes as workarounds—you can now issue store credit directly in your Shopify admin. Store credit early access is available with a limited feature set and accessible to all Shopify businesses globally.
Use new store credit features to help you create more flexibility in customer interactions, improve operational efficiency, and help prevent lost sales.
What is 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 is not transferable and is linked directly to the customer to whom it’s issued, either with or without an expiration date.
In Shopify’s early access release, store credit can be viewed, credited, and debited directly from a customer profile, and logged in customers can choose to spend their store credit at checkout.
What are the benefits of using store credit?
Utilizing store credit helps create loyal customers, which is key to the long-term growth of your business. While repeat customers account for only 21% of customers, they generate 44% of revenue and 46% of orders. And they cost less to acquire too: acquiring new customers costs five times as much as 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 to your shop. If included as a part of a rewards or loyalty program, store credit can be used as a tool to express your appreciation to customers for their repeat business.
Customers often end up spending more money than the balance of store credit issued. For example, if a customer is issued $20 in store credit, they’re likely to spend more than $20 when redeeming that credit in their next purchase. Increasing average order value among returning customers is a simple yet effective strategy to help drive customer lifetime value in the long term.
Create greater flexibility in customer interactions
Every interaction you have with a customer is an opportunity to turn a one-time exchange or visit into a lifelong customer and loyal advocate for your brand. Offering store credit in your loyalty and customer support workflows, whether pre- or post-purchase, can help build a positive rapport and reputation that leads to returning business. And because store credit is not transferable, you can be sure that store credit issued is being used by its intended recipient.
Store credit can be offered as compensation for a poor experience, to reward customers for their previous purchases, and as a part of a marketing incentive or campaign that helps drive sales.
Build a source of truth for store credit balances, orders and customers
Unlike some of the popular workarounds to store credit, such as 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 within the Shopify admin.
Opting to introduce store credit into your workflows in place of workarounds helps increase transparency and accuracy when analyzing your customers, their behaviors, and their orders.
How store credit works
Store credit is available to all Shopify businesses globally, with a feature set that will grow throughout the year.
Apply store credit at checkout
Enabling store credit at checkout gives your customers a way to spend the store credit that you issue. When a customer is checking out, the option to apply store credit to their order will appear after the customer 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 when they are logged into new customer accounts. Before issuing store credit to customers, you should make sure the login experience version is set to new customer accounts in your Shopify admin, or that you have provided the customer with a URL that gives access to new customer accounts. This URL can be found in your customer accounts settings, even if the version of login experience is set to classic customer accounts or if you have no logged in experience at all.
Issue store credit directly from your Shopify admin
Store credit can be credited and debited directly from a customer’s profile, where you can also see store credit balances that a customer is currently holding in one or more currencies.
When issuing store credit, you can enter the amount to credit, and whether or not the credit expires on a specified date. Store credit can be manually deducted from a customer profile by debiting the balance. Any spend by the customer, or any manual debit, will be applied to the soonest expiring credits first. After a credit or debit is actioned, the change in the customer’s store credit balance will appear as a timeline event on the customer’s profile. When a customer spends store credit at checkout, it is reflected in the order timeline.
Track and analyze store credit
Understanding how much outstanding store credit you have issued to customers as well as being able to understand how and when store credit is redeemed can help you strategize for the long term.
By selecting a store credit balance on a customer’s profile in a specified currency, you are able to view all the transactions that have taken place in relation to that store credit balance. This includes the existing balance, detailed transaction history, and the amounts that are due to expire.
More on the horizon
Store credit on Shopify is currently in early access. By the end of this year, we’ll introduce new functionality, including:
- The ability to issue store credit in lieu of a refund, to reduce the volume of returns your team has to handle, keep cash flowing to your business, and improve customer retention
- Improved analysis for store credit, the ability to assign reason codes for reporting purposes, and shop-level reports for balance and liability
- Segments, triggers, and automated workflows that help you target customers with store credit, automatically issue store credit as incentives, notify customers of expiring store credit, and more
Tips to get the most out of store credit
Get creative with store credit
Store credit isn’t just for rectifying customer support issues or driving customer loyalty; it can also be used to help acquire new 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 versatile tool for your business.
Cross-sell and upsell using the Customer API
Looking to improve and diversify your marketing campaigns? Using the Customer Accounts API, you can identify a customer’s store credit balance, making it easy to send engaging and personalized marketing communications to customers who hold store credit.
Get started with store credit today
Start winning back customers and building brand loyalty. Issue store credit using Shopify’s early access features, directly from your Shopify admin. To learn more about how to start issuing store credit today, visit our Help Center.
