How to Switch Loyalty Apps Without Losing Customer Data
Moving a loyalty program to a new Shopify app takes one CSV upload. Here is what comes across, what you rebuild, and the three mistakes that cost people data.
Moving a loyalty program to a new Shopify app takes one CSV upload. Point balances, lifetime points, VIP tiers and birthdays all come across. The earning rules, rewards and emails get set up fresh in the new app, which is the moment most stores fix the parts of the old program that were not working.
Essential Loyalty is a Shopify loyalty and rewards app covering points, VIP tiers, referrals and store credit. The steps below use it as the example, but the sequence is the same whichever app you move to.
What comes across, and what you set up fresh
Your customers keep what they care about: their points, their tier, and the birthday you promised to reward.
| Comes across in the file | Set up fresh in the new app |
|---|---|
| Point balance | Earning rules |
| Lifetime points | Rewards and what they cost |
| VIP tier | Emails to customers |
| Birthday | Widget and on-site design |
| Email and phone number | Referral links |
Two things are worth knowing before you start. The record of how each point was earned stays in the old app, so a customer who had 2,400 points (~$24) arrives with 2,400 points and a clean history. And any discount codes your old app already handed out keep working until they expire, because those belong to Shopify, not to the loyalty app.
If you want a refresher on how the pieces fit together before you rebuild, how Shopify loyalty points work covers the basics.
Things worth fixing while you move
You are rebuilding the program anyway. That makes this the cheapest moment you will ever have to change the things that were quietly annoying you.
What you pay when the store grows. Most loyalty apps price by order volume, so a good month costs you money. Essential Loyalty's top plan is $79 a month for unlimited orders, and on the plans below that, passing the order limit moves the store up a tier automatically, so there is no surprise overage bill at the end of the month. Per-block overage charges are common elsewhere, so read the pricing page of whichever app you are moving to before you commit.
Whether VIP tiers cost extra. Tiers are usually the first thing behind a paywall, typically $30 to $199 a month. Essential Loyalty includes VIP tiers on every plan, including the free one, with real point multipliers rather than a badge. If tiers are new to you, the loyalty program guide covers when they make sense.
Whether points work at checkout. Redeeming points at checkout normally needs Shopify Plus plus a plan between $100 and $499. Essential Loyalty issues store credit that applies automatically at checkout on any Shopify plan.
Whether anyone answers when something breaks. Loyalty runs in your storefront, in your cart and in your emails, so when it breaks, customers see it. Essential Loyalty runs human chat support 24 hours a day, across all time zones.
If you are still deciding where to move, the head-to-head comparisons with Growave, Smile, Rivo and Joy cover how each one handles these four points.
The move, step by step
Export your customers from your current loyalty app. Every loyalty app has this, usually under settings or account. Ask their support if you cannot find it.
Check every row has an email address. That is all the matching needs. You do not need Shopify customer IDs, and you should not spend an afternoon looking them up.
Check everyone is in your Shopify customer list. Almost always they are, because your old loyalty app was reading from Shopify in the first place. Anyone who is not in Shopify yet gets skipped, so add them to Shopify first if you spot any.
Build the new program before you import anything. Set your earning rate, create your rewards, and create your VIP tiers using the same tier names that appear in your export. If your old app called a tier "Gold" and the new one has no tier called "Gold", that column does nothing. This is also where you decide what a point is worth, so the points calculator is useful before you commit to a number.
Copy your data into the new app's import template. Most loyalty apps give you a CSV template to fill rather than accepting your old export as-is. In Essential Loyalty you download it from Settings → CSV Imports; its columns are Email, Points Balance, Lifetime Points, Phone Number, Shopify Id, Birthday and VIP Tier. Fill in what you have and leave the rest blank. Files can be up to 100 MB.
Upload the file. Customers are matched by Shopify ID or by email, whichever the row carries.
Turn the old app off last. Not first. Keep it installed and running until you have checked the import and your new widget is live, so nobody loses access to their points in the gap.
Three things that go wrong
Uploading the same file twice. An import sets each balance to the number in the file, so running the same file again rolls customers back to their migration-day balance and clears anything they earned in between. If only part of a file went through, upload the remaining rows as a new file rather than re-sending the original.
Two rows for the same customer. If one person appears twice, only one of the two balances is applied. De-duplicate by email before you upload.
Rows with no points. A customer with a zero balance is not created during an import, even if the row has a birthday on it. They join the program the first time they shop, which is usually what you want anyway, since a migration file is mostly dormant accounts.
How long does the move take?
In Essential Loyalty, a file of a few hundred customers finishes in a minute or two. Larger files take longer but do finish; we have run single imports of more than 13,000 customers.
The rebuild in step 4 is the part that takes real time, usually an afternoon. Booking a call is worth it if your old program had a lot of custom earning rules.
What to check after the import
The import history shows how many customers were processed. Open two or three customers you recognise from the file and confirm the balance and tier look right. Check a customer who was in a VIP tier, since that is where a mismatched tier name shows up.
Then look at your storefront as a shopper would. The widget should show a real balance for a logged-in customer before you uninstall anything.
Switching Shopify loyalty apps: common questions
- No. A CSV import carries point balances, lifetime points, VIP tier and birthday across, so each customer sees the same balance in the new widget. Earning rules, rewards and customer emails are the parts you rebuild by hand.
- An email address and a point balance for each customer is the minimum. Shopify customer IDs are not needed: Essential Loyalty matches every row to a customer in your Shopify store by email address.
- No. Expiry dates do not travel in a CSV import. In Essential Loyalty points never expire unless you switch expiry on yourself, which is available from the $24 plan and can be set between 6 and 24 months.
- Yes, and briefly you should. Keep the old app installed until the new program is checked and live, but show only one widget on your storefront so customers are never looking at two different balances.
- No. Referral links belong to the app that issued them, so old links stop working at the switch. Send customers their new link once the new program is live, and update any links sitting in emails or social posts.
- No, there is no automatic rollback. An import sets each balance to the number in the file, so test with a file of about ten customers first and upload the full list once the result looks right.
Migration help is included on every Essential Loyalty plan, including the free one, and it is a person rather than a document. You can send your export file and have someone else handle the mapping and the upload.
Prices and features checked September 2026. Loyalty apps change their plans often, so check current pricing on the vendor's site before deciding.
Written by
Milda Gaigalaite
Content and SEO specialist at Essential Apps. 8+ years in digital marketing, with the last 3 spent deep in the Shopify space, understanding how merchants grow and what gets in the way.
