Docs/Merchants/Getting Started
What is Toki?
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Toki is a loyalty and rewards platform for Shopify brands. It turns one-time buyers into repeat customers with points, referrals, memberships, and store credit — all running natively in your store, online and at POS.
This article gives you the lay of the land. Every building block below has its own section in these docs with detailed setup guides.
The building blocks
Rewards program
The core of Toki. Customers earn points (you can name the currency anything — stars, coins, petals) for actions you choose: purchases, creating an account, following you on social media, referring friends, and more. They redeem points for discounts, free products, store credit, or gift cards.
Paid memberships
Sell recurring or limited-time memberships that unlock exclusive perks: member pricing, exclusive products, bonus points multipliers, free shipping. Think of it as your own version of Amazon Prime.
Referrals
Give customers a personal referral link. When a friend makes their first purchase, both sides get rewarded. Built-in fraud protection keeps self-referrals and abuse out.
Wallet passes
Put your loyalty card in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet. Customers see their points balance on their phone, and you get a push-notification channel that doesn't depend on email open rates.
Campaigns & automation
- Campaigns — limited-time promotions like double-points weekends.
- Workflows — automation triggered by customer behavior (e.g. "when a customer hits 500 points, send them an email").
- Timers — countdowns that create urgency for offers.
Store experience
Exclusive products only members can buy, personalized product recommendations, and on-site widgets that show customers their points and available rewards while they shop.
Communities
Group customers into communities and reward them together — great for ambassadors, wholesale customers, or local clubs.
Where everything lives
Everything is managed from the merchant portal, which you can open from your Shopify admin: open Apps, then Toki. The left navigation has one item per area: Loyalty holds your ways to earn, redemption rules, and tiers, and items such as Members, Design, Campaigns, Workflows, and Wallet Passes each open their own page.
Plan your program
Before you build, make two choices:
- Earned or paid. Customers earn their way into your program through activities, or they buy a paid membership.
- Spendable or tier-based. Customers spend their balance on rewards, or their balance counts toward tiers that unlock perks. A tier with the Cumulative store credit condition counts the credit a customer has earned, not their current balance, so spending doesn't move them down.
Here are four program structures and how each one works in Toki:
| Structure | How it works in Toki |
|---|---|
| Spendable rewards program | Customers earn points or store credit for activities and spend them on rewards. See How points work. |
| Tiered rewards membership | Customers earn their way into tiers, and each tier unlocks its own perks. See Membership tiers. |
| Paid membership | Customers pay monthly, quarterly, annually, or once for a membership and its perks. See Paid memberships. |
| Deposit membership | A paid membership whose reward is store credit worth more than its price, for example $60 in store credit for $50. See Membership rewards. |
You can run several at once, for example spendable points alongside a paid membership.
Rewards for joining your newsletter or SMS list (Newsletter sign up, Klaviyo: Sign up, and Postscript: SMS sign up) can give store credit, which adds to the customer's balance, or a discount code, which the wallet lists under Your Coupons.
Next steps
- Install Toki — takes a few minutes from the Shopify App Store.
- Set up how customers earn and spend points.
- Set up your membership tiers, if your program has them.
- Design the wallet your customers open on your store, in the Design editor.
- Connect your email or SMS tool on the Integrations page, and build automated flows there with the events and properties Toki sends it.
- Launch, then layer on referrals, paid memberships, and wallet passes as you go.