RewardStream has commercially launched our plugin for e-commerce retail platform Shopify, and our team couldn’t be happier about it.
It’s no secret that year-over-year sales are booming for e-commerce retailers. Online sales in the U.S are forecasted to reach $523 billion by 2020, up 56% from $335 billion in 2015. As a SaaS provider in this digital click-to-buy age, RewardStream is entirely focused on making it easier for online stores grow their customer base through referrals. To enable this, we’ve built seamless integrations with some of the most widely adopted e-commerce programs in the world: Magento, WooCommerce and now, Shopify. These represent three of the fastest growing e-commerce platforms available to online retailers.
Online e-commerce platforms Magento, WooCommerce and Shopify – along with PrestaShop – hold the largest market share of the many providers on the market. The numbers above show the kind of growth figures that these platforms achieved in 2016. Shopify’s growth in 2017 is poised to be explosive. In May 2017, Shopify reported that they’d hit 400,000 merchants and $20.7 million in monthly recurring revenue. Now in their 11thyear, Shopify powers stores for over a million users and has enabled over $34 billion in online sales.
So: Why Shopify and RewardStream?
Shopify plays an important role in RewardStream’s progress. As we grow our list of online retailers, Shopify gives us access to 400,000+ merchants, only a small percentage of which have a referral program in place. Shopify’s ease of self-onboarding for their users is well aligned with our self-serve tools, designed to allow Shopify merchants to configure and launch their customer referral program faster than ever before. Without any manual input or communication from our team, a merchant can have an enterprise-class referral program configured in minutes.
More than their inspirational growth figures, what drew RewardStream to Shopify was a combination of their ease of use and Shopify’s impressive support team. The company routinely relies upon user feedback to update its design and improve its functionality. What impressed us most about Shopify’s place in the market is their active and positive presence on help forums, collective groups and meetup events. There’s a growing community of merchants and app developers willing to share their skills and expertise to developer partners like RewardStream, and there’s a feeling that Shopify takes really good care of its merchants and partners. The Shopify community’s overall positive culture, combined with the support and encouragement they provided to us while we developed our app, has reinforced our belief in their market leadership position.
We’ve also learned other Shopify app developers how active the Shopify merchants are within the app store – particularly when compared to other platforms. At Shopify’s Unite conference we learned that over 80% of Shopify merchants rely on plugin apps to run their online store, with most e-commerce retailers using 3 to 4 apps on average. This count can grow to 16 or more apps as stores scale past $100,000 in revenue.
Though RewardStream is new to the Shopify market, we are the one of the first referral apps to integrate with Shopify’s updated Price Rules API. The API provides stores with the ability to dynamically create discounts with multiple conditions that can be applied at checkout. With this integration, Shopify merchants can target specific purchase conditions to specific customer groups for upselling, “treating” frequent customers, and more.
Our integration allows online retailers to encourage their customers to make referrals right from within the shopping experience. As referrals turn into new customers, we issue secure rewards that customers and prospects can redeem within the shopping interface. E-commerce stores can ensure the referral program reflects their brand and message, and unlike many of the existing players on the market, our solution can scale to support tens or hundreds of thousands of referrals each month.
The RewardStream Referrals Solution for Shopify
Our enterprise-grade solution allows us to serve Shopify stores of any size — from brand new startup stores to massive retail enterprises — with assurance that our system can handle everything from one referral a day to one hundred thousand referrals per month. The RewardStream Referrals app integrates directly within the Shopify shopping cart to make the referral experience seamless for customers. We offer referrals channels that customers use every day, from Gmail to Facebook, WhatsApp and more. Our core features allow merchants to customize promotions, reward types, and have complete control of their branding.
Benefits:
- Eliminate manual processes required to reward advocates – automatically track purchases made by referrals, and issue rewards as they are earned.
- Protect customer’s data – our enterprise-class security is trusted by major telecoms and financial institutions.
- Build a referral program that scales with the business – supporting many thousands of referrals each day.
- Leverage our simple UI designed to reflect the merchant’s Shopify user experience
- Get support from real client success team members to ensure the long-term success of the merchant’s program – our team is there for our customers long after their program launches.
We serve and provide pricing plans for stores of any size. Scale is a big challenge for most SaaS platforms – in just two years Shopify grew from having no enterprise solution to becoming one of two leading enterprise solutions in just 2 years. As such, larger merchants on Shopify seek solutions that they can be confident will scale both as they grow, and in times of peak traffic. In the Shopify community, we learned that merchants often had to remove or disable apps as they grew to a certain volume or prior to big promotions. To us, scale is everything. We run some of the highest volume referral programs on the web today, for some very large companies.
We’re proud to be working with Shopify and their customer base. You can learn more about our integration on the Shopify app store here.