Tiers are available on our Advanced and Plus plans, and as an add-on on Classic. To add tiers to your account, contact our Support team at support@loyaltylion.com.
In this article:
Overview
Loyalty tiers rank your customers by what they have spent, earned, or ordered, and give the customers who reach the higher tiers better rewards. A customer moves up as soon as they qualify, and keeps their tier for as long as your settings allow.
By the end of this article you will have built your tier structure, chosen how your customers qualify and how long a tier lasts, and launched your tiers.
How tiers can help you
Tiers give your customers a reason to keep coming back. Someone who can see they are $50 from the next tier has a concrete reason to place another order, and someone who has reached your top tier has a reason to protect it.
They also let you spend your rewards budget where it works hardest. You can set different points values and different reward costs for every tier, so your most valuable customers get the most generous program.
The different types of tier
Every LoyaltyLion tier is one of two kinds:
Boundary tiers are the backbone of your program. Your customers enter them automatically when they cross a threshold you set, and they can move up and down over time.
Conditional tiers sit outside that ladder. Your customers enter them because of a tag on their Shopify profile, not because of anything they spend or earn.
You can set up to 7 boundary tiers, and 12 tiers in total including conditional and hidden tiers.
For boundary tiers you make two separate choices: what your customers have to do to move up, and how long a tier membership lasts. The two choices are independent, so you can pair any entry mode with any duration.
How your customers qualify
Your entry mode decides what moves a customer up. Choose one of:
Amount spent. Your customers move up when their total spend crosses a boundary you set. This is the most common choice, and the one to pick if you want your tiers to reflect what a customer has contributed to your business.
Points earned. Your customers move up on the points they have earned rather than their spend, so a customer who reviews, refers and follows you can climb without being your biggest spender.
Orders placed. Your customers move up on how many qualifying orders they have placed. This rewards frequency, and it lets you set a minimum order value so a run of small purchases does not move someone up on its own.
There are a few extra settings specific to order-based tiers.
How long a tier membership lasts
Rolling. Your customers are placed into a tier on the basis of their activity over the last 12 months, and hold it for a full membership period before we re-evaluate. Every customer is on their own clock, based on when they joined the tier. 12 months is the default, and you can set a different length.
Calendar year. Your customers are placed into a tier on the basis of their activity during the calendar year, and keep that tier for the whole of the following calendar year. Every customer is evaluated on the same dates, which gives you consistent reporting windows.
Lifetime. Your customers can go up, but never down. They hold a tier until they qualify for a higher one. This suits high-value, low-frequency stores, where a customer might not buy again within a rolling window but you still want to honor what they have spent.
There is more on how calendar-based tiers are evaluated and reset.
Conditional and subscriber tiers
A conditional tier is one your customers join because of a tag on their Shopify profile. It sits outside your boundary ladder and always comes after it. Entry is decided entirely by the tag, so you cannot move someone in by hand. A subscriber tier is a conditional tier reserved for your active subscription customers.
Conditional and subscriber tiers rely on Shopify customer tags, so they are available on Shopify and Shopify Plus only.
Conditional tiers also outrank your boundary tiers, which changes where your customers end up. There is more on how this works, and how to set them up, under conditional and subscriber tiers.
Hidden tiers
Hiding is not a tier type in itself. It is an option you apply to a tier, so that it does not appear in the tier list on your loyalty page and only the customers in it can see it. A hidden tier suits a secret tier above your regular ones, or a completely invisible structure such as wholesale and retail, where your rules and rewards still apply but your shoppers never see the tiers themselves.
There is more on setting one up and who belongs in one under hidden tiers.
How to set up tiers
In LoyaltyLion, go to Program, and then Tiers.
Click Get started.
Add your tiers and boundaries, and choose your entry mode.
Set the points for your activity rules in each tier. We recommend assigning more points the higher the tier, to encourage your customers to move up.
Set the cost and availability of your rewards in each tier. Take care when adjusting discounts, so you do not disrupt the cashback percentage your program runs at.
Choose your tier duration: Rolling, Calendar year, or Lifetime.
Launch your tiers, now or later.
Decide whether to add your customers retroactively. Retroactive placement uses their spend over the last 12 months, counting only orders placed since your LoyaltyLion launch. Otherwise every customer starts with a clean slate in your lowest tier. Your customers are not added retroactively unless you choose it here.
Editing your tiers
Before you launch, you can change anything. Click Manage structure on the Tiers page to edit your tiers, boundaries, entry mode and duration.
Once your tiers have launched, your structure is fixed. You cannot change your entry mode, your boundaries, or your tier durations yourself, so add all the boundary tiers you want before you launch. To change any of these afterwards, contact our Support team at support@loyaltylion.com.
Two things you can still change after launch:
Points and rewards per tier. The points your customers earn for activities, and the cost and availability of your rewards, can be changed at any time.
Conditional tiers. You can add a conditional or subscriber tier after launch from the More actions menu on the Tiers page.
How your customers move between tiers
The rules below apply to every tier type, whichever entry mode and duration you have chosen.
Moving up happens straight away. As soon as your customer crosses a boundary, we move them up and tell them with an on-site notification.
Moving down only happens at re-evaluation. When a tier membership reaches the end of its period, we look at your customer's activity for the qualifying window and either keep them where they are or move them down. When that happens depends on your tier duration: at the end of each membership period for rolling tiers, at the turn of the calendar year for calendar-year tiers, and never for lifetime tiers.
You can see a customer's current tier and how long they will be in it on their customer page.
Refunds and tier status
If you are using points-based tiers, your customers do not upgrade until their order is completed, meaning the points have left the pending state and the approval period for the order has lapsed. Refunds, cancellations and returns change the points balance and can prevent an upgrade.
If you are using spend-based tiers, your customers are not automatically downgraded when a refund, cancellation or return is processed, unless you have set refunds to recalculate tier status. You choose this when your tiers are created, using the Lower a customer's tier after a refund setting.
This setting is on by default for all tiers created after June 16, 2026. To enable it for tiers set up before that date, contact our Support team at support@loyaltylion.com.
Manually moving customers to another tier
To move a customer to a new tier, go to Customers, open your customer's page, then Actions and Change tier. You can make the move permanent, or set it to expire after a fixed number of months, as covered in changing a customer's tier.
Things to be aware of:
Customers you have manually placed into a higher tier are protected from automatic downgrades, so cancellations and refunds will not drop them, even where refunds are set to recalculate tier status.
A manually placed customer stays in their tier until either the period you selected expires, or they qualify for a higher tier on their own.
Limitations:
You can move a customer up into a higher boundary tier, but not down into a lower one. The exception is a customer currently in a hidden tier, who can be moved back down into your boundary tiers.
You cannot manually move a customer into a conditional tier. Tag them in Shopify instead.
A worked example
Say your tiers are Bronze ($0–$199), Silver ($200–$499) and Gold ($500+), on a rolling 12-month duration.
One of your customers signs up and spends $100 straight away, which puts them in Bronze, $100 short of Silver. At month 5 they spend another $150, their 12-month total reaches $250, and they move straight up to Silver. That membership runs a full year, so it holds until month 17.
Where they go next depends on what they buy:
If they stop buying, Silver expires at month 17 and they drop back to Bronze.
If they spend $400 at month 8, their 12-month total reaches $650. They move up to Gold and hold it for a year, to month 20.
If they reach Gold at month 8 but spend only $200 by month 16, Gold expires at month 20 because $200 is well short of the $500 the top tier asks for. They land in Silver and keep it for another year, to month 32.
The rule underneath all of it: your customers move up the moment they qualify, and only move down when a membership runs out.
FAQ
Which platforms can use tiers?
Tiers do not depend on any platform-specific features, so they work with every platform LoyaltyLion integrates with. Conditional and subscriber tiers are the exception, because they rely on Shopify customer tags.
How many tiers can I have?
Up to 7 boundary tiers, and 12 tiers in total once you include conditional and hidden tiers. We recommend keeping the number lower than the maximum, so each tier feels meaningfully better than the one below it.
What customizations are available for tiers?
You can name each tier and give it a color, and adjust the points your customers earn for each activity and the cost and availability of each reward, tier by tier. Further visual customization is available through the CSS editor.
How does a shopper see which tier they are in?
Their current tier appears on your loyalty page, in the tiers section and in the loyalty panel sidebar. They also get an on-site notification when they move up a tier. We do not notify a customer when they move down.
Are there any loyalty emails for tiers?
No. There is no tier-specific loyalty email. We do push tier information to our email and SMS integrations, so you can use it there to personalize your emails or send campaigns to the customers in a particular tier.
Will guest shoppers be placed in tiers?
Not until they create an account. A guest who places an order counts as a customer, but they are not enrolled in your program, so they are treated as being in your default tier without actually holding a membership in it.
This is why the account creation date and the tier join date can differ on a customer page. When a guest eventually creates an account, we place them in the right tier based on what they already spent with you, so their tier membership can start from a different date than their enrollment.
When is the tier minimum purchase date set?
The minimum purchase date, which is the date from which we count spend and points toward tier eligibility, is set the moment you click Launch tiers. It is not set when the launch finishes processing.
Does the approval period affect when a customer moves tier?
It depends on your entry mode. Spend-based tiers do not wait for the approval period, so a customer moves up as soon as their spend reaches the boundary. Points-based tiers do, because points have to be approved before they count toward a tier.
If I import a customer into a tier, how do they progress from there?
We do not ignore the tier they were imported into. Their progress carries forward from that tier, so a customer imported into a tier with a $1,000 boundary needs to reach the next boundary in total, not to spend the full amount again.
Tier imports do not work the same way for order-based tiers.
If a customer redeems points, do they drop a tier?
No. Tier eligibility is based on the points your customer has earned over the qualifying window, not on their current balance, so spending points never moves anyone down. A customer with 2,500 points who redeems 800 of them stays exactly where they are.