Script-based Seamless Free Products
If you are a Shopify Plus merchant, please read the steps below.
You will need to use Seamless Free Product set-up that involves Shopify Scripts, to limit the number of API calls we send when rewards are claimed.
Please get in touch with your Onboarding Manager and let them know:
If you currently use Shopify Scripts
If yes, do you currently have an active line-item script?
if yes, please provide your CPU/memory usage estimates. You can find this in the Shopify Scripts editor tool
4. Our Onboarding Manager will provide the line-item script content for you, including the unique script-key. If you already use a line-item script, you will need to merge our code into your existing script. See here for instructions on how to do this.
5. Let us know once you set the script and publish it, so we can activate it on our side.
Variant-based Seamless Free Product
How to set up Free Product (Seamless) in the rewards section?
1. Login to your LoyaltyLion account
2. Click on the tab Manage
3. On the left, find Rewards and click on Create new reward
4. Find Free Product (seamless)
5. Chose Duplicate an existing product or Use an existing product
Use an existing product (recommended) - it's the simplest and most common, as it works with the products already on your store. If you chose this option, it will create a new variant of the product every time it's claimed. We check the inventory of the reference product when the customer clicks the claim button, and only allow them to claim if there is inventory available.
Note: Remember to hide the reward variant in Shopify, so your customers can claim the reward only through the loyalty page.
Duplicate an existing product - It creates a separate, new product in your Shopify store, that's a copy of an existing one. Select this option if you prefer to think of reward products as separate items. You must manage reward product inventory separately.
Note: Remember to hide the product reward from Shopify, so your customers can claim it only through the loyalty page.
6. Amend additional options:
Cost to redeem - how many points are needed for this reward
Once per checkout - if enabled, this reward can only be redeemed once per checkout
Track Inventory - if enabled, we'll only allow a variant to be redeemed if it has inventory available in Shopify. When a variant is redeemed, we'll decrease its inventory quantity.
Note: if Use An Existing Product was selected, this will be tracked against the original existing products' inventory. If Duplicate an existing product was selected, this will be tracked against the duplicated reward products' inventory
Write Terms and Conditions - these will be visible through a popup from the loyalty panel
Note: Paid Items Required. Seamless free product rewards will require the shopper to have at least one paid item in their cart prior to adding the free products. If you'd like to remove the paid item requirement, please get in touch with our support team at support@loyaltylion.com
7. Click Create
Why do you need to hide the reward variant in Shopify's theme?
If you used the "Use An Existing Product" option, when setting up your Seamless reward, when a customer claims it, it creates a single-use variant that needs to be hidden on your side.
Creating a new variant when claiming a seamless reward was the only effective way to control access to the free products on our side. After testing this, our developers confirmed that any other way would open stores to abuse by customers illegitimately getting free items. With creating a new variant, we have control over who claims a free product and make sure that seamless item redemption is working without fault.
The only way we've discovered so far that can strictly enforce what items are allowed in a customer's cart is inventory quantity - you can't add anything that is out of stock.
There are various apps that support this, but they all work in terms of JavaScript and aren't intended for our use-case (free items). They're all vulnerable to a person, e.g. turning off JS with a browser extension, at which point they're freely able to put whatever they like into their cart. This is acceptable for those apps because they're normally not selling free items, so the incentive for the customer to cheat is limited.
As a result, thus far we've had to create a variant each time with an inventory quantity of 1
, so only the person who redeems the product can get it.
Theme changes are required in order for the Seamless free product reward to work.
FAQ
Q. [Shopify Plus] Does the script-based method mean that when a customer redeems a free product it will pull the original product from Shopify?
If you use the script-based method, this means that we don't create one-off variants anymore. Whether the method selects the 'original' product or not depends if you selected use existing or create duplicate when setting up the reward.
Q. [Shopify Plus] What happens if we decide to publish a new line-item script?
You can only have one line-item script live at a time. If you'd like to publish another line-item script, please make sure you merge said line-item script with the existing LoyaltyLion script.
If you choose to deactivate the SFP script, then you should delete or disable those rewards first.
Q. Can I add another variant to the reward, after I create it?
This is not possible at the moment. You can select the variants of the reward (e.g. size or colour) only during the initial creation of the reward.
If you added a new variant, once the reward was already live, you'd need to recreate the reward.