Reward Your Repeat Customers: Loyalty Points on Haul Pro

Your Repeat Customers Are Your Best Customers

Here's a stat that should change how you think about your business: repeat customers spend 67% more per order than first-time buyers. And acquiring a new customer costs roughly five times more than keeping an existing one coming back.

If you're an independent seller — whether you make candles, ceramics, jewellery, or anything else — you already know this instinctively. Your regulars are the ones who buy every new collection, recommend you to their friends, and leave those lovely reviews that bring in more people. They're the backbone of your business.

So why do most small sellers have no strategy for rewarding them?

Usually it's because loyalty programmes have always been the domain of big retailers with big budgets. The third-party apps that bolt onto platforms like Shopify cost anywhere from £49 to £199 a month — on top of whatever you're already paying. For a small seller doing a few hundred quid a month in sales, that maths doesn't work.

That's why we've built a loyalty points programme directly into Haul's Pro plan. No add-ons. No extra cost. Just a proper rewards system that works for independent sellers.

What the Loyalty Programme Actually Does

In plain terms: your customers earn points when they buy from you, and they can spend those points to get money off future orders. That's the core of it.

But there's a fair bit of flexibility underneath that simple idea. You decide:

How many points customers earn — set a rate like 5 points per £1 spent, or whatever suits your margins
How points convert to discounts — for example, 100 points = £1 off
Bonus points — reward customers for signing up, leaving a review, or uploading a photo review
Promotional campaigns — run multiplier events like "Double Points Weekend" or "5x Points on All Houseplants"

You control the whole thing from your seller dashboard. Your customers just see a clean, simple rewards experience that gives them a reason to come back.

What Your Customers See

A loyalty programme only works if customers actually engage with it. So we've made the experience obvious without being annoying. Here's what the journey looks like from their side.

Browsing your shop

On every product page, customers see a small note: "Earn X points with this purchase." It's not a pop-up or a banner — just a quiet nudge that reminds them there's a reason to buy from you rather than someone else.

Creating an account

When a customer creates an account, they can earn bonus sign-up points straight away. That small dopamine hit of "You've earned 50 points!" gives them an immediate incentive to come back.

After a purchase

Points land in their account after a pending period (14 days by default — more on why later). They can see their balance any time they log in.

Leaving a review

Customers earn bonus points for leaving a review, and extra points if they include a photo. This is a win-win: they get rewarded, and you get the social proof that drives more sales.

At checkout

When a customer has enough points to use, they see an option at checkout to redeem them. They choose how many points to spend — they might use all of them for maximum discount, or save some for later. It's their choice, and that sense of control makes the programme feel generous rather than stingy.

During a campaign

When you're running a multiplier event, customers see a campaign banner on your shop. "Double Points This Weekend" or "5x Points on All Knitwear" — whatever you've set up. It creates urgency without discounting your products.

What You Control as a Seller

The whole programme is managed from a single dashboard in your Haul admin. No coding, no third-party apps, no fiddling around.

Earning rules

Set the base earning rate (e.g. 5 points per £1 spent), plus bonus point amounts for sign-ups, reviews, and photo reviews. You can adjust these any time — if your margins are tight on certain products, you might run a lower earning rate generally and use multiplier campaigns strategically. (Not sure about your margins? Our profit calculator can help you work that out.)

Redemption rules

Set the conversion rate (e.g. 100 points = £1 off) and the maximum percentage of an order that can be paid with points. That max percentage is important — it means a customer can't pay for an entire order with points if that doesn't work for your business. You might set it at 20% or 30%, so points always supplement a real purchase rather than replacing one.

Pending period

Points don't become available immediately — there's a waiting period (14 days by default) before a customer can spend them. This protects you from someone buying, spending the points, and then returning the original order. You can adjust the pending period to match your returns window.

Expiry

Set an expiry period for unused points. This encourages customers to come back within a reasonable timeframe and keeps your outstanding points liability manageable. Most sellers find 12 months works well — long enough to be fair, short enough to drive action.

Branding

Don't want to call them "points"? Rename them to anything that fits your brand. "Stars," "Seeds," "Sparks" — whatever makes sense for your shop. A plant shop might use "Seeds." A jewellery maker might use "Gems." It's a small thing, but it makes the programme feel like yours, not a generic bolt-on.

Multiplier campaigns

Create time-limited campaigns where customers earn at a higher rate. Set the multiplier (2x, 3x, 5x — whatever you like), choose which products or collections it applies to, and set the start and end dates. Campaigns show automatically on your shop with a banner, so customers know about them without you needing to do anything extra.

Customer management

See which customers have the most points, who's actively earning and redeeming, and who might need a nudge. You can also manually adjust point balances if needed — useful if you want to give a loyal customer a one-off bonus or sort out a mistake.

Stats dashboard

Track the programme's performance: total points issued, points redeemed, redemption rate, average order value for loyalty members vs non-members, and repeat purchase rate. These numbers tell you whether the programme is actually working and help you tweak the settings over time.

Worked Example: A Candle Shop

Let's make this concrete. Say you run a candle shop on Haul. Your bestselling candle is £25, and you've priced it properly with a healthy margin built in. Here's how you might set up your loyalty programme:

Setting	Value
Earning rate	5 points per £1 spent
Sign-up bonus	50 points
Review bonus	25 points
Photo review bonus	50 points
Redemption rate	100 points = £1 off
Max redemption	25% of order
Pending period	14 days
Expiry	12 months
Points name	"Sparks"

Now here's what happens when a customer discovers your shop:

First visit: They create an account and get 50 Sparks straight away.
First purchase: They buy that £25 candle and earn 125 Sparks (5 per £1). They've now got 175 Sparks total.
They leave a photo review: That's another 50 Sparks. They're at 225 Sparks.
Second purchase: They come back a month later and buy another candle. They've got 225 Sparks, which is worth £2.25 off. The max redemption is 25% of £25 = £6.25, so they're well within the limit. They choose to use all 225 Sparks and pay £22.75 instead of £25.
That second purchase earns them another 114 Sparks (5 per £1 on the £22.75 they actually paid), and the cycle continues.

The discount is small enough to protect your margin but meaningful enough to make the customer feel rewarded. And that photo review they left? That's now sitting on your product page, convincing the next person to buy.

Now imagine you're launching a new winter collection. You run a "Triple Sparks Weekend" campaign — 15 points per £1 instead of 5. Customers who've been saving their Sparks now have a reason to buy immediately, and the ones who buy during the campaign will come back later to spend the extra points they've banked. It creates a virtuous cycle.

How This Compares to Third-Party Loyalty Apps

If you're on Shopify, you've probably looked at loyalty apps. The two big names are Smile.io and LoyaltyLion. Here's what they cost:

Provider	Monthly Cost	Notes
Smile.io	£49–£199/month	Free tier exists but is extremely limited (no customisation, Smile branding everywhere). Useful features start at the £49/month Starter plan.
LoyaltyLion	From £159/month	Aimed at larger brands. Powerful but priced well beyond what most independent sellers can justify.
Haul Pro	£35/month (total)	Loyalty programme included in the Pro plan at no extra cost, alongside everything else in Haul.

With Smile.io's cheapest paid plan, you're paying £49/month just for loyalty — on top of your Shopify subscription (from £25/month), your theme, your other apps. Before you've sold a single thing, you could be looking at £100+ a month in platform and app costs.

With Haul Pro, the loyalty programme is part of the package. £35/month covers your entire shop, including the loyalty programme, with no per-transaction platform fees beyond Stripe's payment processing. That's a meaningful difference when you're trying to build a sustainable small business.

Built-In Safety Features

A loyalty programme that's easy to abuse isn't much use. We've thought about the edge cases so you don't have to. Here's how the system protects you:

Pending period: Points aren't available to spend until the pending period has passed (14 days by default). If someone returns an order, the points are automatically reversed before they ever became usable.
Auto-reversal on refund: If you refund an order — whether during the pending period or after — the points from that order are automatically clawed back. If they've already been spent, the customer's balance goes negative, which is deducted from future earnings.
No points on guest checkout: Points are only awarded to customers with accounts. This prevents someone from creating throwaway accounts to farm sign-up bonuses.
Points and discount codes are mutually exclusive: A customer can't stack a discount code on top of a points redemption on the same order. It's one or the other. This stops the "double-dipping" problem that plagues some loyalty programmes.
One review bonus per product per customer: A customer can only earn review points once per product they've purchased. They can't leave five reviews on the same candle to rack up points.

These aren't buried in settings somewhere — they're baked into how the system works. You don't need to configure them or even think about them. They're just there, quietly keeping things fair.

Give Your Best Customers a Reason to Stay

The maths is simple. If you can turn a one-time buyer into a repeat customer, they'll spend more, cost less to reach, and tell other people about you. A loyalty programme is one of the most straightforward ways to make that happen — and until now, it's been too expensive for most independent sellers to bother with.

The Loyalty Points Programme is included on Haul's Pro plan at £35/month, with no extra fees, no third-party apps, and no surprise costs. If you're building a brand that people come back to — and you should be — this is the tool to make it happen.

Join the Haul waitlist to be first in when we launch.