When a customer makes a purchase which qualifies for earning Rewards points, the process of awarding those points to the customer does not begin until the transaction is tendered through the Point Of Sale.
Once the transaction is completed in POS, any points earned will not be immediately available for the customer to redeem. A good rule of thumb is to expect that points awarded today will be available to redeem tomorrow. In practice, it's usually sooner than this, but this guidance helps to manage your customer's expectations.
An important point to note is that the Customer Rewards platform calculates the value of points to be awarded, based on any Promotions that are active at the time the order is created, rather than the date the transaction is processed.
This ensures that the customer receives the correct value of points promised at the time they place the order.
To provide an example, let us imagine that I place an ecommerce order for an item which is part of a Promotion that will earn triple points.
If I place the order in the late evening of the last day of the Promotion, the earliest that order is likely to be processed through POS is the following day, when the Promotion has ended.
If the Customer Rewards platform calculated points based on active Promotions at the time the order is tendered - rather than the time it was created - I'd miss out on the triple points.
Using this logic means that the customer receives the points they were expecting at the time they placed the order.
