What is a Loyalty Points Program?

How to setup a Loyalty Points Program

• An Event is the description of the Loyalty Points Platform you want to use and its program requirements. You can create an Action Event or a Purchase Event. An Action Event rewards points based on an action, such as volunteering at an adoption event or posting on your social media. A Purchase Event rewards points based on dollars spent at your store. You can choose how many points or fractions of a point you want customers to earn based on an Action performed or a Dollar spent.
  
• A Reward is the offering when the program requirements have been met. This can literally be anything you wish, $ off, % off, an item, a service, get creative!
  

My Points Setup - Step One - Creating Loyalty Events

A pop-up window will appear where you can enter the information for the new event.  This information includes the title, description, dollar amount, and number of points earned.  Make sure the Status is Active and click Save Changes when done.

My Points Setup - Step Two - Creating Loyalty Rewards

A pop-up window will appear where you can enter in the information for the reward.  This information includes the title, description and required points.  Make sure the Status is Active and click Save Changes when done.

You can add as many rewards as you like, and your customers can "spend" their points as they like on these rewards. 

Checking Out a Customer with Loyalty Points

If a customer has participated in events and earned points in the past, their current points total will appear below their name on the left of the checkout screen.

Adding Points

To add the points they are earning during this transaction click the red Manage Loyalty Points button located below their current points total. This will bring up a pop-up. Depending on the style of your Points Event you will either be typing in the dollar amount associated with their current Purchase, or you will be entering the number of times they performed the Action you are rewarding points for.

In the example image below we are adding the Purchase amount, dollars and cents to the Qty field. So this Pet Owner's sale came to a total of $53.26. You can include the change, and don't worry about rounding up or down, Astro will handle that for you.  When you are finished, click Save Transactions.

It is up to you whether you reward your customer for the Sale Total (after tax is applied) of their Purchase, or for the Subtotal of their Purchase (before tax is applied).

Then Astro will add the points you just entered to Today's Purchases. 

The points are also added, temporarily, to a Loyalty Points card at the very bottom of the Pet Owner's Frequent Buyer cards. Here you will see how many points they just earned compared to the dollar amount they just spent. In this example when a customer spends one dollar they earn one Kat's Mutts Point.

The card will also showcase the Event and the Event description. The card is not permanent and will not appear again until after a customer earns more points. 

If you made a mistake you can either click the Remove button associated with the Points Earned under Today's Purchases, or you can click the brown X on the Loyalty Point Card.

If you notice, the customer has not been awarded their 53 points yet. Their current Loyalty Points total below their name is still showing their previously earned total of 262. Your customer will not be awarded the points you just added until after you click Checkout.

Once you are satisfied that you have entered the correct amount of points to their Pet Owner account you can save the loyalty transaction by clicking Checkout and move on to the next screen. Now you will see that your customer has been awarded their newly earned 53 points and their Loyalty Points total is now 315. You will also see the newly earned points mentioned under Loyalty Transactions This Visit. Here you will see exactly how many points the customer was awarded. Since the Points Event in this example is $1=1pt Astro will round up or down depending on the cents entered, so $53.26 became $53 since .26 is less than .50.

Once you have reviewed the transaction you can finalize it by clicking Finished.

Removing Points:

You can subtract points if a customer's points exceeded the amount they were suppose to have.  On the checkout screen, click Manage Loyalty Points.

Put a minus sign in front of the number that needs to be removed then click Save Transactions. Then select Checkout and Finish the transaction to save the changes to the customer's account. 

How to View Your Customer's Loyalty Points History and Possible Reward Options:

To view your customer's Points History click the red Loyalty Details button. You can find this button on either their first checkout screen (above where it says Checkout) or the second screen prior to clicking Checkout (above where it says Finished). This will bring up a pop-up that shows you every time your customer Earned Points and every time your customer spent their points earned on one of your Rewards. 

The Description column will show the name of either the Event or the Reward, Date reveals the date the transaction occurred, Qty is either how many dollars were spent (Dollars Spent Event), how many actions were performed (Actions Event) or how many Rewards were Redeemed, and finally Points reveals how many points were either awarded (positive number) or spent (negative number). 

If you click on Reward Options button in the top right corner;

You will see all Reward Options available on the your loyalty program regardless of whether or not the customers have enough points to earn those Rewards. This is to help the cashier remind the customers of what is available to them now and if they decide to hold out and earn more points. Click on Loyalty History to return to the previous page and can click on the Close button when done.

How to Redeem Points for a Reward

If your customer have earned enough points to redeem one of your Rewards there will be a notification on the customer's Pet Owner Checkout screen that will say, "Customer is eligible for Loyalty Redemption. Click to Redeem Loyalty Points after Checkout". 

To redeem some of your customer's points for a Reward click Checkout to move onto the Redemption screen. Then Click to Redeem Loyalty Points will appear on the same Redemption Alert as a clickable link. 

Clicking this link will open up a redemption pop-up for Loyalty Points. It will show you how many points your customer has to spend. The pop-up will only show you a list of Rewards that the customer has enough points to redeem with the points they currently have. Beside those Rewards there are drop-downs that will allow you to select the quantity (Qty) of that reward the customer wishes to redeem. In the example below the customer has 262 points they can spend, so technically they could redeem the first Reward, 5% off Any Package Treat twice. In this instance I am only going to redeem for one, so I selected 1 from the drop-down. Then to the right you will see the number of points that will be deducted once the Reward is redeemed. Once you have selected the Reward your customer wants to redeem select Save Redemption Selection. 

Remember, this is your Loyalty Points Program, so if you only want to redeem Rewards once per transaction you have every right to do that. Or you can redeem as many rewards per transaction that your customer can afford.

Now under Loyalty Transactions This Visit you will see the Reward your customer has redeemed minus the points they spent on it. You will also notice that under Loyalty Points it will show the customer's new points total now that those spent points have been deducted. 

If the customer had also earned some points during this transaction those would also be listed under Loyalty Transactions This Visit. 

Once you are satisfied, click Finished to finalize the transaction.

Loyalty Points and the Lightspeed-Astro Integration

If you want your points program to be able to communicate with Lightspeed you will need to designate a Loyalty Event as a Lightspeed Event. Selecting Yes will make it so that every time you click the Astro Loyalty button on your Lightspeed interface the integration will translate the dollars spent into points automatically according to the dollar to point ratio you designate on the loyalty event.

Select Yes to make it a Lightspeed Event

Now you can choose whether you want your points to be based on one of three ways.

1. Sale Subtotal - This is the before tax and discount total. Astro will default to this setting if you do not change it. This is the best option for you if you do not want to reward points for tax dollars spent and you do not have a high volume of programmed discounts applied to your LS items.
   
2. Sale Total - This is the after tax and discount total, which is the total amount your customer will owe you at the close of their transaction.
   
3. SKU Subtotal - This will allow you to reward points based on specific inventory items as long as they have an assigned Category in Lightspeed. You are able to Include specific categories and/or Exclude specific categories. This allows you to run more than one Event in Lightspeed at a time and to only issue points for items that are not a part of a Frequent Buyer Program.
   

For SKU Subtotal categories, sometimes Astro doesn't always like categories that contain numbers, or categories with multiple spaces. So if you find that Astro is not recognising a LS category that you have assigned to your inventory items, such as "Buy 12 FB" try changing it to something like "FB" or "Frequent Buyer" or "FrequentBuyer" in Lightspeed then perform a test transaction to test to make sure your points program excluded or included what you intended. 

Assigning Categories to Inventory Items in Lightspeed

Setting up Multiple Lightspeed Events Using SKU Subtotal

 This is useful for a couple scenarios. 

• You want to only issue points for items that are not a part of a Frequent Buyer Program
  
• You want to reward one point value for some items and a different point value for other items. This is great if you want to reward double points for services such as dog washes and grooming, or if you only want to reward half points for food items. There are so many possibilities.
  

First choose SKU Subtotal as your Dollars Based On option. 

SKU Subtotal with Include and Exclude Fields

This will create two additional fields. Include Lightspeed Category Words & Exclude Lightspeed Category Words

How to Exclude or Include Categories from an Event

This system was not actually designed to work with your existing Categories as is, but instead it is designed to allow you to add a keyword to existing categories that you wanted excluded or included.  So here is an example of how it would work.

1. You create a points event in Astro and add a keyword, such as AstroExclude to the Exclude Lightspeed Category Words field for the event.
2. In Lightspeed, you would add “ – AstroExclude” to the category or categories you wanted excluded from the points events.  If you want an entire category excluded, you can just add AstroExclude to the main category.  If you just want certain sub categories excluded, you can add AstroExclude to each sub category.
   
3. Conversely, if you have more categories you want to exclude than ones you don’t, you could add something like AstroPoints to the Include Lightspeed Category Words and leave the Exclude Lightspeed Category Words blank.

Lightspeed Events Based on Actions

Redeeming Points with the Astro-Lightspeed Integration