Loyalty schemes fail for boring reasons. Usually the shop owner has to remember to do something.
A punch card only works if somebody punches it. A spreadsheet of regular customers works until it does not. A discount code for good customers works until you forget who the good customers are.
Perkie is the version that runs itself.
The core of it
Set what a dollar is worth. A customer places an order, the order completes, and the points appear on their balance. Nobody does anything.
Points accumulate into a running total the customer can see, with a full transaction history behind it: what they earned, when, and which order it came from. When they redeem, that shows too. Nothing is a mystery to the customer, which removes most of the questions a loyalty scheme generates.
Awarded on completion, not on checkout
Points land when an order reaches completed, not when the customer clicks pay.
This matters more than it sounds. Awarding at checkout means points for orders that get cancelled, orders that fail payment, and orders that turn out to be fraud. You have handed out currency for a sale that never happened, and clawing it back is worse for everyone than never issuing it.
Waiting for completion means the balance reflects real, finished business.
What counts towards earning
You choose what the points are calculated on, because "the order total" is more ambiguous than it looks once shipping, tax and discounts are involved.
You can also exclude particular products or whole categories from earning. Every shop has something that should not generate loyalty points: the loss leader, the gift card, the item you sell at cost as a favour to a supplier.
Reversed when money goes back
Refund an order and the points that came from it are reversed.
Not doing this is how a loyalty programme becomes a way to extract free product: buy, earn, refund, spend the points. Perkie treats a refund as undoing the transaction, points included.
The ledger is yours
Every points movement is a row in your own database. The balance is not a number held by a third party and shown to you through an API.
That is the practical difference between Perkie and a hosted loyalty app. Your customers’ balances are in your backups, queryable, and still there if you change how you do anything. A loyalty programme is a liability you have taken on with your customers, and it should not live somewhere you cannot see it.
Where customers see it
On their My Account page, under a dedicated rewards tab: balance, history, tier progress, and what they can redeem.
On product pages, as an earning badge. In the cart and at checkout, as an estimate of what this order will earn. And for visitors who are not logged in, a nudge that creating an account would earn them something.
Those prompts are the part that makes a programme work. A loyalty scheme nobody knows about changes nobody’s behaviour, and most schemes are invisible until the customer happens to find the page.
Signup bonus
You can award a flat bonus when someone creates an account. It is the cheapest way to get a customer over the line from guest checkout to registered, and a registered customer is one you can talk to again.
Works alongside HQ, fine without it
Perkie keeps its own customer records and works on its own. When Tracksies HQ is installed the two link up, so loyalty is part of the customer picture rather than a separate silo.