Smile: Loyalty Program Rewards

Sept. 16, 2025

not great. it seems they hide the fact that nothing seem to be included in the $49 option so you have to upgrade to $199. I think being more up front with customisations and what you get ie no landing page, no links, nothing. The reason i wanted this ... which i thought was common sense... was so that the the app would sync to a landing page and work smoothly ie for better customer / shopper satisfaction. I hoping that the app may change my mind and we will stick with it . Smile have since got in contact and suggested options so I will test these and test the app.

July 18, 2025

This app is decent, but too many issues make it grossly overpriced for what it provides. Customers are constantly being rewarded duplicate discounts for reaching tiered levels. I have had this issue several times now with support telling me it was fixed when it clearly has not been. Also, if you refund orders, rewards then do not get credited back to the user, so it must be done manually. This will always be a headache if you cancel any orders.

June 3, 2025

Good for point tracking and rewards as long as you have everything set up exactly as needed before issuing any points or rewards. Many limitations with rewards that support did not have a solution for. Hard to make any adjustments or updates to rewards once they are in place and running.

July 25, 2024

Reading some worrying reviews and too many without a reply, although most are positive. Only installed the app yesterday so this might not be the best feedback (I can always update). They would love charging you based on the number of orders but with the free plan the customers don't get to see the points on the product page, account page, checkout and post purchase. The customers are also limited in redeeming the points at the checkout. So on one side, Smile.io would love to make more money if we generate more orders, while restricting our customers experience with their reward system and ultimately our growth and Smile's. This makes no sense.

June 20, 2024

Tout est parfait, tant au niveau des fonctionnalités que du service client. Sauf qu'au final je n'ai pas pu l'utiliser car certains éléments ne PEUVENT PAS être traduits (par exemple les boutons d'action). Cela m'a fait perdre beaucoup de temps et un peu d'argent car évidemment c'est le type de chose dont vous vous apercevez en finalisant l'app. Donc nickel tant que vous restez en anglais, sinon, passez votre chemin.

Oct. 18, 2023

Very basic features for the price... Not worth the money in my opinion. The UI is easy to navigate for users but in terms of value as a merchant, the features are lacking. Point collection is simple for users but if you want to do anything to incentivize users to actually use their points, you'll need to upgrade to the $200/ month plan. With that being said, basically all of the useful features are on the $200/ month plan. If you have the budget, go for it, but to me, the value just isn't there with what you're getting compared to other apps in our tech stack. I wish we would have looked into alternative options before committing to Smile. Hard to switch at this point.

Oct. 17, 2023

Not able to manually translate.

March 4, 2022

I have been using this app but seems the upgrade plan price is high , beyond the average rewards program. Even so, I could not send point reminder emails in the free plan thus by now it seems not doing much help for my flower business at the moment.

Jan. 15, 2022

The loyalty and referral programs are great, and their support is fantastic! Mackenzie was really prompt in answering all our queries. EDIT: 2022-01-14 After using Smile for a few months, I've reduced our ratings to 2 stars. Two of our biggest complaints are: 1. Terrible UX for discount code redemption: The user "applies" a discount code on the cart page via the Smile nudge, but there is no user visible feedback whatsoever that the code has been applied. About 75% of our customers that create discount codes don't actually end up redeeming them because of this, and we think our conversion rates have actually *reduced*. Our tech team spent significant amount of time trying to fix this on our end, but because Smile runs within an "iframe" there is absolutely nothing you can do. Be prepared for customer complaints that their points redemption isn't working. 2. Mediocre functionality to handle customer refund abuse: A customer can place an order, redeem their earned points and then return their original order. Effectively, they've gotten "free" points. There's nothing you can do to address this, other than manually inspect the points dashboard in Smile and address these cases. Not at all feasible if you deal with a large quantity of orders and operate on thin margins. There are easy tech solutions to this (e.g. Smile could let us delay awarding points by x days), but Smile doesn't support them. Unfortunately we can't really disable the program once we've launched it without aggravating our loyal customers. So we're stuck dealing with these issues while we look for an alternate program to migrate to. Regardless of the app issues, their support team is stellar in their responsiveness.

Jan. 20, 2021

I think too little is offered in the free plan because it is not worth paying for the plans if it is difficult to get persons to sign up. Customization of rewards still has its limits. will rate again at a later date

Aug. 17, 2020

Seems like the app would be easy to use if you are starting from scratch. I am trying to convert from another loyalty program to Smile. The app description claims this is possible but I cannot figure it out. I have submitted two help requests and have not received a response.

June 4, 2020

They change the price plan frequently. Imagine a function from $0 to $199/month, I mean the "free product function". Since we have using this app for a long time and there are over 30k members join the plan, I admit that I'm suffering from making the decision about if we should stop using this app. I can pay for the function of course, just think the functions that smile offers does not match their plan price. I'm not sure if this is what they called the "loyalty project", just a little bit disappointed and will not recommend this app to my friends

May 1, 2020

While this app is easy to set up and use, for $49 a month - which is NOT CHEAP - id like to be able to at least gain some deeper analytics that what is currently received - which is almost nothing. Only once were we offered able to offer to our customers a promotion to "double their points" and when i enquired re running this special again, was told it was only offered based on algorithms? i have not seen it since and that was around a year ago. It does not give me incentive to upgrade the account to a more expensive plan and will be looking at alternative apps this year. I would not recommend this app to other business's based solely on the lack of analytics available.

Aug. 2, 2020

*Update on previous 4 star review So it seems Smile has decided to pull back what they offer on the free plan and has pushed some of the basic features things to $199USD (not even the $49USD plan) which is dissapointing. I think pulling features back on a "sticky" product is a bit of a sneaky trick because business owners are unwilling to change an app that has lots of their customer data integrated into it. Adding new features to entice people to upgrade or pay is a much nicer way of doing things. My initial annoyance with the app still hasn't been fixed 6 months later and I still have customers wanting to include freebies on the order they just placed, which causes us issues and upsets customers, they need to fix it so that rewards get emailed to the customer after the order has been fulfilled. I'm going to start looking at a new rewards program, this one just isn't working well for us and causes me annoyance on a weekly basis. Great app. would give 5 stars however, please please please can you reinstate reward customers when the financial status is shipped for shopify customers, instead of paid. It is causing lots of admin headaches in our company and upsetting customers. The issue is a customer makes a purchase then gets a reward email immediately then wants to bundle / redeem the reward with the order they just placed, we use a 3PL and don't get always get a chance to change the order and really its not generating return business, instead just costing us money and upsetting customers when we cant combine the order.

Jan. 30, 2020

recently i suffer fm "your points redemption could not be completed, try again later", both customer and admin cannot redeem

Dec. 24, 2019

We've been using this app for about 3 years. Overall I find the app to be missing features that I really want. My biggest sticking point is that the points are awarded right away after purchase. It would be much better from our standpoint if we could set a grace period where the points are awarded after the return policy period has ended. For example, a customer ordered several items from us and immediately redeemed her new points for a free necklace that we offer as one of the rewards. She then returned most of the order, but kept the necklace. She now has a negative points balance from her return and has not made an eligible purchase to get rid of that negative points balance. Smile does not offer a way for us to make sure the customer is keeping their purchase before they receive the points. Another sticking point, the referral promo code link allows people to send coupons to themselves, even if they enter their own email and name that is used for their rewards. In some cases the system has caught it and "blocked" it, but only after the customer has received the promo code and used it! Smile had a feature that excluded promo code purchases from earning points and we had been using that feature for years, until one day it was just gone. When I wrote them and asked them why they took away a feature without notice, they simply wrote back and said nobody was using it. I can assure you that's not true, because WE were using it every day. Now we have to deduct points manually for every ineligible purchase which is a real time waster for us. We also had a backlog of ineligible points that we had to go back and adjust because they did not inform us of the change. Very unprofessional. I've seen much better rewards programs than this elsewhere. We'll be phasing it out. It's more trouble than it's worth.

June 23, 2019

There are some fantastic features in smile however there are some limitations such as the ability for self referral using the refer a friends rewards. For the price being charged there should be something in place to restrict people from claiming a reward generated by themselves. This artificially inflates ROI.

Jan. 29, 2019

I have Smile.io set up to pay out rewards in levels $5, $10 & $25 but it will only pay $5 at a time and only one per purchase. Also, lately it won't connect to my POS so I end up giving the customer a $5 discount to keep them happy. Support isn't available before I go into work and I'm a small business owner with little availability during the day. There's no email address where I can send my concerns.

Nov. 26, 2018

Customers received an email with notification of rewards but they say they can not use their points earned... so??? it is useless, doesnt work for its purpose

Oct. 31, 2018

Love the concept of the app, but fairly frustrated with the customer support and troubleshooting thus far. Pros: The Concept & Easy to set up. Cons: Zero troubleshooting, no customer support over the weekend We have had 2 major hurdles with our app since starting it earlier this week. We reached out on Thursday evening for help with an issue and had moderate help throughout the day via chat on Friday, but the issue was not solved, and we were told we had to wait until Monday for this issue to be fixed when another rep would be back who could better assist me. Not a major issue, but still frustrating. The second issue seems to be a glitch in the app or something wrong with how we set it up for our VIP Tiers, not sure. This is causing our customers to not show up higher than the lowest tier, regardless of qualifiers achieved. We reached out on Friday for help, but their customer service was gone for the weekend, including the email listed for urgent requests. I handle a lot of apps, from a lot of developers and usually can find the solution to problems like this fairly quickly. However, the smile backend has zero troubleshooting help that I can find for this issue. It has very clear and defined info on how to set something up, but zero guides on how to troubleshoot any problems that arise. I understand people don't want to work weekends, but for an app of this size, and this importance, I feel this is inexcusable. The internet never closes and having an app that literally requires direct customer engagement and involvement like this needs a support team that can help every day of the week. Regardless of the lack of support over the weekend, there is still a huge problem with no troubleshooting help, and it confuses me an app of this size can care so little for helping their customers through problems. Give us the power to solve problems ourselves if you aren't going to have a weekend shift. We announced our rewards & VIP program, then immediately got hit with customer service questions from our customers who are angry, confused or frustrated that their VIP tiers are not showing up correctly. So our customers who were most excited to take advantage of this program, are getting an introduction to our rewards program in a negative way. This simple error here has lead to a pileup of work for us, frustrated customers and a steady 5+ hours of work on my end within the app trying to fix it alone. I imagine my problem here is not that complicated to fix, but I am at a standstill. Not a great start to an app we were excited about. Lesson learned though, we should never launch a new app like this prior to the weekend if they don't have 7 days a week customer support. Update: Raised review to 3 stars after being reached out to about this issue on Monday. Update2: Back down to 2 stars. It does the basics, and we will continue to use it due to not having the time to set up a new plan on another platform until after the holidays. I have 3 new issues to share here. Issue 1: VIP Program. We downgraded to the free plan because the VIP program did not go as intended. From the beginning, it simply was not clearly defined and caused a lot of confusion. As a result, I was having trouble getting people set up in the appropriate VIP tiers for past purchases, and I followed some advice from their CS team to temporarily change from a dollars VIP program to a points VIP program. I was not informed, nor smart enough to notice, that in doing so there are no safeguards in place to stop you from rewarding hundreds of customers with thousands of dollars in free merchandise. As suggested, we changed to a point system temporarily to see if that would help get people to the proper tier, and due to the ratio of dollars to points being way off (1000 points is wayyyy easier to get then $1000 spent) hundreds of customers automatically qualified for our top tier VIP program without actually spending the money to do so. We made a huge mistake and had to cancel the program altogether - in addition we then had to honor many free gifts for our customers due to the mistake, and offer alternative prizes to those who qualified for a tier we simply couldn't afford to do (multiple people who $100+ value in products). This was largely my mistake, not theirs, but a simple warning somewhere along the way mentioning that the dollars to points ratio does not change automatically when you change the VIP qualifiers would have saved a major headache. Such a situation should have a warning in place prior to rewarding hundreds of people. Issue 2: Referrals. We have free stickers on our website as a great first touch for new customers. However, the referrals program will still work for people who are referred to our website, but end up just purchasing free stickers, and nothing of value. Despite the "this coupon only works if the customer spends $X or more" the referrer still gets the referral bonus regardless of amount spent. Not an issue for companies that don't have free products on their site, but a major issue for us. We do have a note on our FAQ page that notes a referral where the customer spends under $10 will be automatically removed and then we manually remove any of these referrals on the back end. Seems like this would be an easy fix, but when confronted about it Smile was unable to help us. Issue 3: Integration at the free level. The lack of any integration with the free plan is frustrating, especially when we want to simply integrate it with our customer service platform. As a result, any customer service related issues in regard to this app (a daily thing) have to be manually adjusted in the app itself, instead of the customer service app ticket. I do not want to upgrade to the $100+ a month just to integrate this app into our customer service app. Alrighty, I am done rambling. Hope this helps.