Tiers are available on our Advanced and Plus plans, and as an add-on on Classic. Tier benefits are available on Shopify only. To add tiers to your account, contact our Support team at support@loyaltylion.com.
In this article:
Overview
Tier benefits are rewards and perks your customers get only by reaching or staying in a particular loyalty tier. They make your higher tiers worth reaching, and give your customers a reason to keep their status once they have it.
Your tier benefits show on the shopper-facing tier components on your loyalty page, so your customers can always see what they have and what the next tier would give them.
The three types of tier benefit
Automatic. Sets the text on your loyalty page, and awards the benefit on every applicable purchase. Free shipping or 10% off, for example.
Entry rewards. Sets the text on your loyalty page, and triggers a one-time reward when your customer enters the tier. A free $5 voucher, for example.
Basic, text only. Sets the text on your loyalty page and nothing else, for perks you fulfill yourself.
Automatic benefits
Benefits we apply for your customers automatically, every time they buy, for as long as they are in the tier.
Automatic benefits depend on the Shopify Metafields integration, which you turn on under Manage, then Integrations, then Shopify. After you enable it, the first sync can take a while on stores with over 1 million customers. Setup is covered under Shopify metafields.
Automatic benefits start applying as soon as you save them in LoyaltyLion. Make sure you are happy with the discount before you save.
When you add one, you can set:
Minimum spend, the amount your customer has to spend before the benefit applies.
Maximum discount, a cap on the discount applied. This is useful for limiting your exposure when you offer several shipping options.
Free shipping
Apply free shipping to specific tiers, and your customers in those tiers get it automatically at checkout. It appears in Shopify as LoyaltyLion Free Shipping.
It works by deducting a set amount from whichever shipping option your customer picks, rather than by zeroing the shipping line. If your free shipping benefit is worth $5 and your customer chooses an express option costing $12, we take $5 off and they pay the remaining $7.
Percentage discount
Set a discount percentage per tier, for example 5% in Silver and 10% in Gold, and your customers in those tiers get it applied automatically. It appears in Shopify as LoyaltyLion Percentage Discount.
Stacking automatic benefits with other discount codes
Both automatic discounts are set to combine with other Shopify codes by default:
Free shipping is a shipping discount, set to combine with product and order discounts, but not with other shipping discounts.
Percentage discount is an order discount, set to combine with product, order and shipping discounts.
For these to work alongside your own Shopify codes, set those codes to combine with the matching discount class: shipping for the free shipping benefit, and order for the percentage benefit.
Entry rewards
One-off rewards granted when your customer enters a new tier, such as a $5 off voucher on reaching Silver. They are good for celebrating a milestone and building excitement around progression.
Entry rewards can be set on your second tier and above. We do not allow them on your default tier, because they exist to drive progression.
These reward types are supported:
Voucher rewards, covering product vouchers, free shipping, discounts, Recharge active subscription vouchers, and collection vouchers
Gift cards
Custom rewards
These are not:
Recharge product rewards
Seamless free product rewards
When an entry reward triggers again
An entry reward is triggered once per tier period. When a customer enters a tier, we look back over a cutoff window for a previous membership of that same tier. If we find one, this counts as a recent re-entry and no reward is triggered. If we do not, it is a fresh entry and the reward fires.
How far back we look depends on your tier duration:
Lifetime tiers. We look back to when your tiers launched. Lifetime tiers never reset and your customers never move down, so an entry reward is never triggered twice.
Rolling tiers. We look back by your membership duration.
Calendar year tiers. We look back by the evaluation window, so a 12-month window checks the preceding 12 months.
A customer enters your Gold tier on January 1, 2026, on rolling tiers with 12-month memberships. The cutoff is January 1, 2025, and we look for any earlier Gold membership that started on or after that date. If there is one, no entry reward is triggered. If there is not, the reward fires.
The same rule applies when your customers enter conditional tiers and when you move them into a tier by hand.
Entry rewards, launching and imports
An entry reward only triggers when a customer moves from one tier into another. A customer receiving their very first tier membership is not moving between tiers, so no reward fires. That has three consequences worth knowing before you run an import.
Placing your customers retroactively at launch does not trigger entry rewards. Everyone is getting their first membership, so nothing fires.
Importing customers into tiers before you launch does not trigger entry rewards, for the same reason.
Importing customers into tiers after you have launched does. Those customers already hold a tier, so the import moves them between tiers, and every customer moved up receives the entry reward for their new tier.
Check your entry rewards before importing customers into a live program. An import that moves a large number of customers up will issue an entry reward to each of them.
Basic, text only
Perks you fulfill yourself, which we show on your loyalty page but do not deliver. For example:
Early access to sales
Invitations to events
Exclusive product drops
Priority customer service
We can advise on how to fulfill these, but fulfillment is yours to run and we cannot set it up for you. The two sections below cover the approaches merchants use most.
Fulfilling early access to sales and launches
Using your email or SMS platform. Create a hidden sale or collection page, and email only the customers in the tiers that should get in early.
Make sure your integration is installed, and use our tiers merge field to segment your customers.
Create a hidden page holding the sale products or new releases.
Send a campaign to the segmented tier group, linking to that hidden page.
Using tier tags to show exclusive pricing on your storefront. This is available on Shopify Plus only.
Turn on the Shopify Metafields integration, covered above, which writes each customer's tier to Shopify as a tag in the form tier: Gold.
Use that tag on your storefront to show sale prices to customers in the right tier.
Email those customers to tell them their early access is live on site.
Fulfilling priority customer service
How you set this up depends on how you run support. If you work from a shared inbox:
Create a priority customer service email address.
Share it with the customers in the tiers that should have it, through your email platform.
Have your support team work that inbox ahead of other requests.
You can also automate this with one of our supported helpdesk integrations.
How to add tier benefits
In LoyaltyLion, go to Program, and then Tiers.
Click into the Benefits section.
Click + to add a benefit, or click an existing benefit to edit it.
Use the checkboxes to choose which tiers the benefit applies to.
Save your changes.
Displaying tier benefits to customers
Showing your tier benefits lets your customers see what they have now and what the next tier would give them, which is what makes the next tier worth reaching.
Any benefit you add displays automatically on your loyalty page under the Tiers section if you use the Theme Editor, or through the tier overview component in our SDK.
FAQ
Can automatic tier benefits be stacked with other rewards?
Yes, as long as Discount Combinations is enabled. A customer with a 5% automatic discount can also use a $5 off reward on the same purchase.
What if my customer has free shipping but picks a more expensive shipping option?
They still get the value of the benefit deducted. If your free standard shipping benefit is worth $5 and they choose an express option costing $12, we take $5 off and they pay the remaining $7.
My tier benefits have stopped working. What is wrong?
The discount may have been deleted from your Shopify account by mistake. Log in to Shopify, open Discounts, and check that LoyaltyLion Free Shipping or LoyaltyLion Percentage Discount is still there. If it is missing, go back to LoyaltyLion and re-save on the tier benefits page, and the discount reappears in Shopify.
If your automatic discounts are not applying at checkout, your customers' metafields may not be updating because a definition is set incorrectly. A single wrong definition stops all of them updating, so check your metafield definitions.