Gone are the days of clunky gift cards and discount code workarounds—you can now issue store credit directly in your Shopify admin or on Shopify POS. Store credit is available to all Shopify businesses globally.
Use new store credit features to help you create more flexibility in customer interactions, improve operational efficiency, help prevent lost sales, and build customer loyalty.
What is store credit?
Store credit is monetary value given to your customer or potential customer to spend in your store. Unlike gift cards or discount codes, store credit is not transferable and is linked directly to the customer to whom it’s issued, either with or without an expiration date.
Store credit can be viewed, credited, and debited directly from a customer profile, or from an order page when issued as a refund. Customers can either spend store credit in store with Shopify POS, or online at checkout when logged in to their customer account or with Shop Pay.
What are the benefits of using store credit?
Store credit helps create loyal customers, which is key to the long-term growth of your business. While repeat customers account for 21% of customers, they generate 44% of revenue and 46% of orders. Repeat customers are your most profitable customers: acquiring new customers costs five times as much as it costs to retain an existing one.
Offering store credit to customers creates more flexibility in your customer interactions, improves operational efficiency, and helps drive customer retention, loyalty, and sales.
Help prevent lost sales and encourage customer retention
Store credit creates a reason for customers to come back to your shop. If included as a part of a rewards or loyalty program, you can use store credit as a tool to express appreciation to customers for their repeat business.
Issuing store credit refunds for a return helps ensure that you keep cash flowing back into your business and improves customer retention. Customers often end up spending more money than their store credit balance. For example, if a customer is issued $20 in store credit, they’re likely to spend more than $20 when redeeming that credit in their next purchase. Store credit is a simple and effective strategy to help increase average order value in returning customers, and drive long-term customer lifetime value.
Create greater flexibility in customer interactions
Every customer interaction is a chance to turn a one-time visitor into a loyal brand advocate. Store credit in your loyalty and support workflows builds lasting relationships and drives repeat business. Since store credit is non-transferable, you can be confident it reaches its intended recipients. Use store credit strategically—whether compensating for issues, rewarding purchases, or powering marketing campaigns.
Build a source of truth for store credit balances, orders and customers
Unlike some of the popular workarounds to store credit, such as gift cards and discount codes, store credit balances and transaction history are recorded and referenceable directly in a customer’s profile. Store credit is also a payment method type in analytics and reporting within the Shopify admin, making sure that your financial reports are accurate and reliable.
Opting to introduce store credit into your workflows in place of workarounds helps increase transparency and accuracy when analyzing your customers, their behaviors, and their orders.
How store credit works
Store credit is available to all Shopify businesses globally.
Apply store credit at checkout
Enabling store credit at checkout gives your customers a way to spend the store credit that you issue. When a customer is checking out online, the option to apply store credit to their order will appear after the customer logs in to their customer account. A customer can log in directly from the checkout page using a one-time six-digit verification code that’s sent to their email address or using Shop Login.
For security, store credit can only be accessed by customers when they are logged into their customer account or Shop Pay. Before issuing store credit to customers, make sure the login experience version is set to customer accounts in your Shopify admin, or that you have provided the customer with a URL that gives access to customer accounts. This URL can be found in your customer accounts settings, even if the version of login experience is set to legacy customer accounts or if you have no logged in experience at all.
Issue store credit directly from your Shopify admin
Store credit can be managed directly from customer profiles in your admin. Add or deduct credit, set optional expiry dates, and view balances across currencies. Credits automatically apply to earliest expiring balances first, with all transactions and changes logged in the customer's timeline. These include debits, credits, expirations, and spending at checkout.
Refund orders to store credit
Regardless of the original payment method, store credit can be issued as a refund by selecting ‘store credit’ as the refund method on the order. You have the flexibility to decide how much store credit to issue as a refund. You can also split the refund between store credit and the original payment, and set an expiration date for the store credit amount.
Store credit on Shopify POS
You can also issue, accept, and refund to store credit directly from Shopify POS, further bridging your online and in-store experiences. A customer can also spend store credit in-store that was issued online.
Track and analyze store credit
Understanding how much outstanding store credit you have issued to customers as well as being able to understand how and when store credit was redeemed can help you strategize for the long term.
By selecting a store credit balance on a customer’s profile in a specified currency, you are able to view all the transactions that have taken place in relation to that store credit balance. This includes the existing balance, detailed transaction history, and the amounts that are due to expire.
Furthermore, you can review and analyze shop-wide transaction history using the store credit transactions report in Analytics.
Tips to get the most out of store credit
Get creative with store credit
Store credit isn’t just for rectifying customer support issues or driving customer loyalty; it can also be used to help acquire new customers and increase your brand’s awareness. From referral programs that re-engage previous customers to recommend your products to their family and friends, to offering store credit to your employees as a perk of the job—store credit is a versatile tool for your business. And plenty of apps in the Shopify app store have solutions to make this even easier.
Offering store credit as cashback on orders, for customer referrals, or as a membership signup bonus is a sure way to score repeat sales. You can start rewarding loyalty today with Okendo: Reviews & Loyalty, Redeemly, Novel: Wallet pass for brands. Angle store credit cashback, Memberply, and Koin.
Increase brand confidence by offering store credit for leaving feedback, completing surveys, and making up for issues like shipping delays. Show customers you care and keep them coming back for more with Zigpoll and Insureful.
You can also reward your affiliates and influencers with store credit. They promote your brand, while you get more sales—It's a win win. Start an affiliate program with Afflr, Creator commerce and Buzzbassador.
Create marketing campaigns around store credit
Creating marketing campaigns to encourage customers to spend their store credit is easy with segmentation. You can create a store credit customer segment to group customers together based on their store credit balance, upcoming expiration dates, and last credit date.
And the best part? There are already a few store credit segment templates that exist in admin, such as “Customers with store credit available to spend”, “Customers with store credit expiring in the next 7 days” and “Customers who have not used their store credit after 1 month”. Use these segments to target customers and get them spending their store credit.
Get started with store credit today
Start winning back customers and building brand loyalty. Issue store credit directly from your Shopify admin. To learn more about how to start issuing store credit today, visit our Help Center.
