Earning is the easy half. Redemption is where loyalty programmes either work or quietly become a liability nobody claims.
Too hard and points accumulate forever, which sounds cheap and is actually the worst outcome: you carry the obligation and get none of the return visits it was supposed to buy. Too easy and you are running a discount scheme with extra steps.
The exchange rate
You set what points are worth coming back out. That single number is the lever that decides whether your programme is generous or decorative, and it is deliberately separate from the earning rate so you can tune the two independently.
A useful way to think about it: what would you happily pay, as a discount on a future order, to get a customer to place that order at all? That is the redemption value. Earning rate then decides how long it takes them to get there.
Redeeming
The customer chooses to spend points and gets a coupon, applied to their order. The points come off their balance at the same moment.
What makes this work rather than being a source of support tickets is that it is atomic. The points and the coupon are one transaction. There is no state where the customer has been charged points and has no coupon, or holds a coupon they did not pay for.
If the reward is removed before the order completes, the points go back. Exactly once, no matter which way it was removed.
Capping the share of an order
You set the maximum proportion of an order that points can cover.
Without a cap, a customer with a large balance can take an order close to nothing, and you have shipped goods and paid a payment processor for almost no revenue. A cap keeps every redemption attached to a real sale, which is the entire point of a loyalty scheme rather than a giveaway.
Which rewards you offer
Redemption types are individually switchable, so you offer the ones that suit your business rather than everything the plugin can do. A shop where shipping is the main friction makes different choices from one where margin is tight.
Coupons that cannot be shared
Redemption coupons are locked to the customer who created them: restricted to their email address, with usage limits that stop one being passed around.
This is the detail that keeps a programme honest. A generic discount code posted to a deals forum has cost real shops real money. A coupon that only works for the person who earned it cannot.
The customer’s view
Redemption lives on their account page alongside the balance, the history and the tier progress. They can see what they have, what it is worth, and spend it in the same place.
There is also a browsable rewards catalogue, and inline redemption on product pages, for shops that want spending points to feel like choosing something rather than applying a discount.
Where to configure it
Perkie’s Redemption tab: the exchange rate, the cap, and which types are available. It is a short screen on purpose. Redemption is the part most worth getting right and least worth over-engineering.