Earning rules

Rewards → Earning Rules. Each rule maps an action to a number of points. All are off until you create them.

The actions

Action	Typical use
ACCOUNT_CREATED	A signup bonus. The cheapest way to get someone into the programme.
ORDER_PLACED	The core of the programme. Fixed points or points per pound/dollar.
REVIEW_SUBMITTED	Points for a written review.
REVIEW_WITH_PHOTO	More, for a photo review.
REVIEW_WITH_VIDEO	More again, for video.
REFERRAL_COMPLETED	A referred order. See the caveat in Setting up loyalty.
BIRTHDAY	An annual gift. Pair with a cooldown of 365 days.

Order points

ORDER_PLACED can award a flat number of points, or points per unit of currency — set pointsPerDollar and it overrides the fixed value.

What it multiplies matters, and Evident is specific about it:

Merchandise subtotal, after discounts, excluding tax and shipping.

The reasoning, in short:

• Tax is the buyer’s jurisdiction, not the value of their purchase. Two customers buying identical baskets should earn identical points; with tax in, they do not.
• Shipping is a pass-through cost. Rewarding it pays customers for living far away.
• Discounts come off, because otherwise redeeming a loyalty reward earns points on the money the reward just discounted — a slow perpetual-motion machine.

This is applied identically across BigCommerce, Shopify and headless ingest. Earlier the two paths disagreed and the same basket earned materially different points depending on the platform.

Qualifying statuses

An order earns when its status is Completed, Shipped or Awaiting Fulfillment, compared case-insensitively. This list is BigCommerce-shaped because BigCommerce is the platform whose status is a fulfilment state — see the Shopify note in Setting up loyalty.

When points appear

A background job runs every ten minutes and awards any qualifying order that has no award yet. Points typically land within a few minutes of the status change, not instantly at checkout.

The order row is the event: it does not matter whether the order arrived by webhook, by reconciliation sweep, by API push or by manual re-sync. An order that qualifies and has not been paid, gets paid. That also means an order cannot be double-awarded — the check is on the transaction, not on a flag someone has to remember to set.

Caps and cooldowns

• Max points per action caps a single order’s award. Worth setting if you have a wide price range and do not want one wholesale-sized order to mint a lifetime of points.
• Cooldown days stops repeat earning within a window. Essential on BIRTHDAY (365) and useful on review actions if you would rather not pay for a customer reviewing thirty products in an afternoon.

Cooldowns are per rule per customer.

Auto-rewards

A rule can automatically redeem a reward when it fires, rather than granting points. Useful for a welcome offer: create the account, get the coupon, no arithmetic in between.

Sanity checks before you launch

1. Set the orders start date. Nothing accrues without it. This is the single most common reason a new programme appears dead.
2. Do the arithmetic on your margin. Points per currency unit times your redemption rate is a discount you have committed to. Work out what a fully-earning customer costs you before you publish the rate.
3. Check the platform can issue redemptions. BigCommerce needs store_v2_marketing; Shopify needs write_discounts and write_store_credit_account_transactions. If the connection predates loyalty, you probably need to reconnect.
4. Start narrow. An order rule and a review rule is a complete programme. Birthdays and referrals can wait until the basics are producing.