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Why be Bronze when you can be Silver or even Platinum?

Loyalty tiers are a great way to incentivize your customers to spend more money at your store and encourage customer retention. With tiers, you can give your most loyal customers bigger and better rewards.

Every LoyaltyLion tier is one of two kinds:

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.

This is your tier's entry mode. You can set up to 5 boundary tiers, based on one of the following:

To switch away from spend, change the Entry mode from 'Amount spent' to 'Points earned'. Your boundaries then change to points.

Amount spent is the most common choice, and it's the one to pick if you want your tiers to reflect the contribution a customer has made to your business.
Points earned rewards engagement rather than spend, so a customer who reviews, refers, and follows you can climb without being your biggest spender.
Number of orders rewards frequency, which suits stores with a particular focus on order frequency.

Order-based tiers have one extra decision. You can set a minimum order value, so that only orders at or above that amount count toward moving your customer up, and a run of small purchases won't push someone into a higher tier on its own. You choose whether that minimum is measured on the order total, including shipping and tax, or on the product subtotal alone. Order total is the default, and the setting locks at launch. For the full setup, see our guide to order-based tiers: https://help.loyaltylion.com/en/articles/16442215-order-based-tiers

Rolling 12 months. Your customers are placed into a tier on the basis of their activity over the last 12 months. When they do enough to move up, we move them up immediately. They then stay in that tier for a minimum of 12 months, after which we re-evaluate. Every customer is on their own clock, based on when they joined the tier.

Calendar year. Your customers are placed into a tier on the basis of their activity during the calendar year, and they keep that tier for the whole of the following calendar year. This gives your customers an easy-to-understand timeline for when their status is up for evaluation, in the same way airline status works, and it gives you consistent reporting windows because every customer is evaluated on the same dates. For how the evaluation and reset work in detail, see our guide to calendar-based tiers: https://help.loyaltylion.com/en/articles/13530984-calendar-based-tiers

Lifetime. Your customers can go up, but never down. If a customer moves from Bronze to Silver, they won't return to Bronze. They stay in Silver until they've spent enough or earned enough points to reach Gold. Lifetime tiers suit high-value, low-frequency stores, where a customer might not buy again within a rolling window but you still want to honor what they've spent.

Conditional tiers live outside the normal boundary framework and cannot be added within a boundary tier series. They always sit at the end of your tiers. Your customers don't enter them by spending or earning points, and you can't move someone in by hand. Entry is determined solely by the tag on their Shopify profile, and that tag is managed by your team in Shopify.

Conditional tiers are the right choice when you want to give a specific group their own version of your program: wholesalers who earn at a different rate, an invite-only VIP group, or your staff. The tag is case-sensitive, so it has to match Shopify exactly or nobody is added to the tier.

You can have multiple Conditional tiers, but you can only have one tag per tier. If a customer qualifies for more than one, they are placed in the highest tier they qualify for.

For setup, tag examples, and the full detail, see our guide to conditional tiers: https://help.loyaltylion.com/en/articles/2951704-conditional-tier

A subscriber tier is a conditional tier reserved for your active subscription customers, so you can give them exclusive rewards, bonus points, or both. It rewards the customers who have already committed to you, and gives everyone else a concrete reason to subscribe.

Your customers enter automatically once they have an active subscription, using the tag your subscription platform applies. When a customer stops subscribing, they move to the best tier they qualify for on your other criteria, so nobody is stranded.

You can have one subscriber tier, and it applies to any subscription rather than to a particular product. If you need more granular groups, use conditional tiers with your own Shopify tags. Subscriber tiers and conditional tiers can be used together.

For setup, including connecting your subscription platform and finding your subscribers, see our guide to subscriber tiers: https://help.loyaltylion.com/en/articles/1965849-subscriber-tier

Hiding isn't a tier type in itself. It's an option you can apply to a tier, so that it doesn't appear in the tier list on your loyalty page and only the customers in it can see it.

Hidden tiers suit a secret VIP tier above your regular tiers, 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.

The one thing to watch: a hidden boundary tier is manual entry only, so customers can't be added to it automatically. If you want automatic entry and invisibility together, make it a conditional tier and hide that instead.

For setup and guidance on who belongs in one, see our guide to hidden tiers: https://help.loyaltylion.com/en/articles/1965877-hidden-tier

We recommend that the higher the tier, the more points you assign, to encourage your customers to move up.

You can also adjust the points or the availability for each tier, however be careful when adjusting discounts, as you do not want to disrupt the normal cashback percentage that your program operates at.

Rolling, Calendar year, or Lifetime.
For rolling, you can also add a duration amount, the default being 12 months.

​Launch your tiers, now or later.

You cannot change the tier setup once the tiers are launched.

Decide whether to add your customers retroactively. Retroactive placement uses their 12-month spend, or their activity since your LoyaltyLion launch, whichever happened later. Otherwise every customer starts with a clean slate in your lowest tier. Your customers are not added retroactively unless you choose it here.

You can edit your tiers pre-launch by pressing the Manage Structure button, shown next to the Launch button on the Tiers page. Tiers can only be edited pre-launch. To make changes post-launch, contact our support team at support@loyaltylion.com.

Add all the tiers you want at once. Once your tiers are launched, you can't add or remove tiers yourself.

The rules below apply to every tier type, whichever entry mode and duration you've 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 re-evaluation happens depends on your tier duration: at the end of each 12-month membership 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'll be in it in your LoyaltyLion members' area.

If you are using points-based tiers, your customers won't upgrade until their order is completed, meaning the points have left the pending state and the approval period for the order has lapsed. Any refunds, cancellations, or returns change the points balance and can prevent an upgrade.

If you are using spend-based tiers, your customers won't automatically downgrade when a refund, cancellation, or return is processed, unless refunds are set to recalculate tier status. You choose this when your tiers are created.

This setting is on by default for all tiers created after 16 June 2026. If you would like it enabled for tiers set up before that date, please reach out to our support team, who can add it for you.

To move a customer to a new tier, go to Customers, click on your customer's page, then Actions > Change tier. You cannot move a customer down a tier.

You can make the move permanent or set it to expire after a fixed duration: https://help.loyaltylion.com/en/articles/1965801-managing-members#change-tier

Things to be aware of:

Limitations:

Say your tiers look like this:

One of your customers signs up and spends $100 straight away. That puts them in Bronze, $100 short of Silver.

At month 5 they spend another $150. Once the approval period on that order lapses, 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 from there depends on what they buy.

The rule underneath all of it: your customers move up the moment they qualify, and only move down when a membership runs out.

For more information on our FAQs about the tiers, you can reference this article.
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