Loyalty Programs - handling duplicate customers

[MargueriteJ]

We are a primarily brick and mortar store (2% online sales at this time) and I'm looking for a loyalty app to drive in-store sales from repeat customers. One problem we have is duplicate customers. When the same customer uses different payment methods at checkout (i.e. John Smith has both a Visa and a Mastercard and he uses both to shop at our store), Shopify thinks that customer is two different customers and there's no way to merge them.

For those using loyalty apps in a brick and mortar setting, how does the app you've chosen deal with this issue? It seems to me that the app would have to be smarter than Shopify, and be able to recognize that John Smith is the same customer whether he's using his Visa or his Mastercard - otherwise his points would be spread out between two different customer accounts.

I'm also surprised as the cost of the loyalty apps I've looked at - some as expensive as $700 a month!? I couldn't in a million years pay that much for an app that can't even tell that John Smith with the Visa and John Smith with the Mastercard are in fact the same customer.

So fellow brick and mortar stores, what are you using for a loyalty program?

Thanks for the insight!

[AiTrillion]

Hey @MargueriteJ, I hope you are doing well!

You can achieve this with the help of an all-in-one Shopify app AiTrillion.  If you would like to know how it works and how you can do the setup, you can contact our support at suport@aitrillion.com.

You can refer to this article: https://www.aitrillion.com/knowledgebase/how-to-use-aitrillion-with-the-shopify-pos/

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Thanks

[Lawson_Thalmann]

The duplicate customers thing is a huge huge pain. Lot's of customer issues with this. We use Shopify POS and that makes the problem even worse when you talk verbally to the customer and the cashier doesn't know which account to use. We're onboarding to Yotpo for rewards, but I don't think any of them have a solution for this. I guess Shopify has always struggled with this and I'm not sure why they're not investing in customer account merging as a new feature. Most POS systems can do it.