This guide covers the configuration and management of loyalty program rules within the Dutchie platform. It is intended for Dispensary Managers and System Administrators who are experiencing issues with how points are earned, when they expire, or which customers are eligible to participate in the loyalty program.
What is the issue?
Customers are not accruing points correctly, points are expiring at the wrong time, or specific customer groups are being incorrectly excluded from the loyalty program. This involves the loyalty settings within the Dutchie Admin panel or synchronization issues with third-party loyalty integrations.
What’s causing the issue?
Most loyalty issues stem from incorrect accrual settings, such as points being calculated on post-tax instead of pre-tax totals, or eligibility restrictions that inadvertently exclude certain customer types. In cases of third-party integrations, the root cause is often a configuration mismatch between the provider's dashboard and Dutchie.
How do I solve the issue?
Before beginning, ensure you have the necessary administrative permissions to modify financial and customer settings. If you use a third-party provider like Alpine IQ or Springbig, verify that your rules are active in their respective dashboards first, as these rules sync to Dutchie.
- Navigate to Settings > Loyalty.
- Select the Rules tab to view your current configurations.
- Review the Accrual section to confirm the points earned per dollar spent.
- Check the Tax Calculation toggle to determine if points are awarded on pre-tax or post-tax totals.
- Navigate to the Expiration section to set or modify the validity period (e.g., 12 months, rolling expiration, or no expiration).
- Go to the Eligibility section to define criteria for Medical versus Recreational customers or geographic restrictions.
- Click Save.
- If using a third-party provider, go to Settings > Integrations and click Sync to ensure the updated rules are pulled into Dutchie.
Note that changes to accrual and expiration rules apply to future transactions and do not retroactively affect existing customer point balances.
Possible alternative causes
1. Ecommerce loyalty redemption misconfiguration: If the issue is specifically with online loyalty, all three settings must be enabled: Redeem Rewards at POS, Show Loyalty Rewards, and the LaunchDarkly flag. Missing any one blocks online redemption.
2. Customer profile merge issues: Customers with duplicate profiles (e.g., separate Med/Rec profiles) may see incorrect point balances if profiles aren't properly merged.
3. Discount sync conflicts: Loyalty discounts that work in POS may fail in ecommerce due to discount sync restrictions (e.g., manual application method, "Available Online" set to No).
4. Browser/cache issues: Customers or staff viewing stale data after rule changes.
5. Permissions gap: The admin making changes may not have full permissions, causing a
silent save failure.
6. Segment-level misunderstanding: If loyalty is tied to segments, and segments recalculate nightly, there may be a delay before new rules take effect for newly qualified customers.
7. Multi-location inconsistency: Rules configured at one location may not propagate to other locations in a chain without explicit setup.
8. LaunchDarkly flag not enabled: A feature flag controlling loyalty behavior may be off or partially rolled out in production.
Commonly asked questions
- Why didn't my customer get points for their last purchase?
- How do I stop points from expiring so quickly?
- Can I make it so only medical patients earn loyalty points?
- Why are points being calculated after the sales tax is added?
- My loyalty program isn't working, what do I check?
- Why are some customers earning points but others aren't?
- I changed my loyalty rules but nothing happened, why?
- How do I set up different loyalty rules for medical vs. recreational customers?
- My third-party loyalty provider (Alpine IQ/Springbig) isn't syncing correctly with Dutchie.
- Why do my customers' point balances seem wrong after I updated the rules?
- How do I change when loyalty points expire?
- Can I make loyalty points never expire?
- Our points per dollar ratio seems wrong, where do I fix this?
- We switched from pre-tax to post-tax loyalty calculations and customers are confused.
- My loyalty settings look right but customers still aren't getting points online.