If a customer decides to spend some of the Rewards points they have earned, they can either do this by redeeming the points during the checkout on your e-commerce site, or asking to use their points when making an in-store purchase.

When points are assigned to the transaction, they become 'pending' until the transaction is finalised (tendered through POS to completion).

By putting points into a pending state, we prevent a customer from redeeming more points that they're entitled to.  If the pending status wasn't in place, this could give rise to situations such as the one described below:

1.  A customer has 1000 Rewards points and applies these to a purchase on your e-commerce site, but does not complete the checkout;
2. The customer then visits your store and uses their 1000 Rewards points towards a purchase;
3. The customer returns to their e-commerce order and checks out, using the 1000 Rewards points they'd originally applied to the transaction.

In this scenario, the customer has been able to spend double the amount of Rewards points they had actually earned.

So, putting the points into a pending state is the best way to guard against this.  Using our example above, as soon as the customer has applied their 1000 Rewards points to the transaction on your e-commerce site, those points are now pending and cannot be used in a different transaction, unless the customer removes the points from their e-commerce basket.

How do I manage a customer's pending points?

You can do this from your Customer Rewards Store Interface:   https://customerrewards.citruslime.com/

Once logged in, select the Customers option from the main menu, use the filters to locate the customer in question, then click Edit next to their record.

Scroll down the page to the section titled Points Logs, then click on the subheading Pending Points.  This will expand out to show a list of any pending points on the customer's account:

Why might I need to cancel pending points?

Occasionally, you may encounter a situation where a customer has a positive Rewards points balance, but finds that their points are not available to redeem.  This is almost always due to their points being in a pending state, and this can arise due to scenarios such as the below:

1. The customer begins an e-commerce order on their mobile device, redeems their Rewards points, but does not complete the order;
2. At a later stage, the customer then starts a fresh order on a different device and finds that they no longer have any Rewards points available to redeem.

This has happened because the original order, which they did not complete, caused their Rewards points to enter the pending state.

In this type of situation, where the customer might not be able to go back and remove the points from their e-commerce basket, you might choose to cancel their pending points:

By doing this, you make those points available again for the customer to redeem.