BON Loyalty Program & Rewards vs. Essent Loyalty Program Rewards: A Detailed Comparison

Introduction

Selecting the right retention tools for a Shopify storefront involves more than just comparing features; it requires an understanding of how those tools integrate into a broader growth strategy. As customer acquisition costs continue to rise, the ability to turn a one-time buyer into a repeat customer is the primary factor in long-term profitability. Merchants often find themselves choosing between specialized applications that promise deep functionality in a single area or broader platforms that attempt to cover more ground.

Short answer: BON Loyalty Program & Rewards excels in complex environments requiring B2B features, headless commerce compatibility, and deep POS integration, whereas Essent Loyalty Program Rewards provides a highly rated, straightforward solution for merchants who prioritize ease of use and standard reward widgets. Evaluating the total cost of ownership is essential, as an integrated approach can often reduce the technical debt and operational friction caused by managing multiple disconnected subscriptions.

The purpose of this analysis is to provide a fair, feature-by-feature comparison of BON Loyalty Program & Rewards and Essent Loyalty Program Rewards. By examining their pricing structures, integration capabilities, and specific functional strengths, merchants can determine which application aligns with their current operational maturity and future scaling requirements.

BON Loyalty Program & Rewards vs. Essent Loyalty Program Rewards: At a Glance

Deep Dive Comparison: Core Features and Workflows

Understanding how each application handles the fundamental mechanics of a loyalty program is the first step in making an informed choice. Both BON Loyalty and Essent Loyalty offer the standard "earn and redeem" loop, but their execution differs significantly in terms of scope and target audience.

Points and Rewards Mechanics

The ability to award points for specific actions—such as making a purchase, following a social media account, or celebrating a birthday—is the foundation of both tools. BON Loyalty emphasizes a seamless experience across multiple touchpoints. It allows merchants to integrate the loyalty program not just on the homepage or product pages, but also directly into the Shopify checkout for Plus merchants. This reduces friction during the most critical part of the customer journey.

Essent Loyalty focuses on making the rewards program feel fun and gamified. Their system is designed around a customizable loyalty widget that allows customers to track their progress and redeem rewards easily. While both apps support standard discount types like percentage off and fixed amount off, BON Loyalty explicitly mentions support for free shipping rewards and the ability to exclude specific collections or products from point earnings even on their free tier.

Referral Program Implementation

Referrals are a cost-effective way to acquire new customers through the trust of existing ones. Essent Loyalty provides a clear referral link system where customers can refer friends and earn discounts. This is often a primary driver for merchants looking to lower their acquisition costs.

BON Loyalty includes what they describe as an "Anti-Cheat" referral program. This is a critical feature for growing brands that may face fraudulent referral attempts. By adding layers of verification or logic to the referral process, BON helps ensure that rewards are only granted for legitimate new customer acquisitions. Both apps automate the email notifications associated with these referrals, keeping participants informed without manual intervention from the merchant.

VIP Tiers and Customer Segmentation

VIP tiers are essential for increasing customer lifetime value (LTV) by encouraging higher spending levels. Both applications offer tiered programs where customers can unlock accelerated point earning rates and exclusive perks as they move up.

Essent Loyalty includes VIP tiers across all their plans, including the free tier (up to 150 orders). This makes it very accessible for new stores. BON Loyalty, however, positions its VIP tiers as part of its "Growth" plan and above. The trade-off is that BON offers specialized B2B tiers, which are essential for wholesale businesses that need to separate their retail loyalty logic from their bulk-buying customer rewards.

Customization and Control

For a loyalty program to be effective, it must feel like a natural extension of the brand rather than a third-party add-on. The degree of control over the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) varies between these two solutions.

Branding and Layout

Essent Loyalty provides a dedicated loyalty page and a loyalty widget. Their "Starter" plan at $29 per month unlocks full customization, allowing merchants to align the look and feel with their brand identity. The focus here is on a "friendly" setup that doesn't require technical expertise to look professional.

BON Loyalty offers similar branding capabilities but caters to more technically demanding environments. Starting at the "Growth" tier, merchants can unlock custom CSS with developer support from the BON team. This is a significant advantage for brands with strict design guidelines that cannot be met by standard toggles and settings. Furthermore, BON’s "Professional" plan includes a Software Development Toolkit (SDK) and full API access, which is necessary for stores running on headless architectures like Shopify Hydrogen.

Multi-Language and Internationalization

Both applications recognize the importance of catering to a global audience. They offer multi-language display capabilities, ensuring that loyalty prompts and rewards are understandable to customers in different regions. This is particularly important for Shopify merchants expanding into international markets who need their retention tools to be as localized as their product descriptions.

Pricing Structure and Value for Money

The pricing models for these two apps reflect their different target segments. Merchants must look beyond the monthly fee and consider order limits and feature gates.

The Entry Level: Free Plans

Both apps offer a "Free Forever" or "Free" plan, but the constraints differ. Essent Loyalty caps its free plan at 150 loyalty program orders. This is a generous starting point for very small stores, especially since it includes VIP tiers and referral programs right away.

BON Loyalty’s free plan does not explicitly list an order cap in the provided data, but it focuses on providing the core points and referral mechanics. It even includes advanced features like automated emails and the ability to exclude products or collections, which are often paid features in other apps.

Mid-Tier Scaling

At the $25 to $29 range, the apps are quite similar. BON's Basic plan ($25) adds a loyalty page, POS rewards, and points expiration reminders. Essent's Starter plan ($29) emphasizes full customization and fast-track support.

As the store grows, the "Growth" plans for both apps are priced at $99. At this level, BON Loyalty removes order limits and introduces B2B tiers and "Order Boosters." Essent Loyalty continues to offer its full suite of features but scales with the merchant's needs.

Enterprise and High-Volume Requirements

At the highest end, the gap widens. BON Loyalty’s Professional plan is $349 per month and is clearly built for the Shopify Plus and Headless commerce ecosystem. It includes custom development packages and priority support.

Essent Loyalty’s Plus plan is $499 per month. While it offers all advanced loyalty programs and full customization, it is positioned as a premium version of their core offering. Merchants at this level must decide if they need the technical flexibility of an API-first approach (BON) or the reliable, high-support environment of a proven widget-based system (Essent).

Integrations and Ecosystem Fit

An app is only as good as its ability to communicate with the rest of the tech stack. Data silos are the enemy of effective marketing.

BON Loyalty Integration Strengths

BON Loyalty has a robust list of "Works With" partners. These include:

• Shopify POS (for omnichannel rewards)
• Shopify Flow (for workflow automation)
• Review apps like Fera, LAI, and Judge.me
• Page builders like PageFly
• Marketing platforms like Klaviyo

The integration with Shopify POS is a major highlight for merchants who have physical retail locations. Rewarding online and in-store shoppers with the same points balance creates a unified brand experience that is hard to achieve with simpler tools.

Essent Loyalty Integration Strengths

Essent Loyalty focuses on the core marketing essentials. It works seamlessly with:

• Klaviyo
• Omnisend
• Shopify Customer Accounts

While the integration list provided is shorter than BON’s, it covers the most critical paths for email marketing and customer communication. For many merchants, having a deep integration with their email service provider (ESP) is the most important requirement, as it allows for the inclusion of point balances and referral links in automated newsletters.

Performance and Operational Overhead

Every app added to a Shopify store has the potential to impact site speed and administrative complexity.

Technical Performance

BON Loyalty’s support for Headless (Hydrogen) and its SDK suggests a focus on performance-optimized storefronts. By allowing developers to pull loyalty data via API, brands can build custom front-end experiences that do not rely on heavy external scripts that might slow down the initial page load.

Essent Loyalty relies on a widget-based approach. While widgets are easy to install, they can sometimes lead to "layout shift" or slower interactions if not optimized. However, with a 5.0 rating across 368 reviews, it is clear that Essent has optimized its delivery to satisfy a large number of merchants.

Administrative Load

Managing a loyalty program involves setting up rules, monitoring for fraud, and responding to customer inquiries about points. Both apps provide 24/7 support to help with these tasks. Essent Loyalty highlights "fast-track support" on its paid plans, which is a value-add for busy merchants. BON Loyalty offers "24/7 live chat" and "Support Priority" for its Professional users, ensuring that technical issues are resolved quickly.

The Alternative: Solving App Fatigue with an All-in-One Platform

While choosing between specialized apps like BON and Essent is a common path, many growing merchants eventually encounter the challenge of tool sprawl. As a store scales, managing separate apps for loyalty, reviews, wishlists, and referrals becomes increasingly complex. Each new app adds another subscription to the monthly bill, another script to the storefront, and another dashboard for the team to learn. This fragmentation often leads to "app fatigue," where the overhead of managing the stack begins to outweigh the benefits of the individual features.

When merchants begin evaluating feature coverage across plans, they often realize that an integrated approach can streamline their operations. This is the core of the "More Growth, Less Stack" philosophy. Instead of stitching together various point solutions, a platform like Growave allows a brand to manage its entire retention strategy from a single interface. By seeing how other brands connect loyalty and reviews, it becomes clear that the synergy between different modules is what truly drives growth.

Benefits of an Integrated Retention Suite

An integrated platform solves the data silo problem. When your loyalty program and your review system live in the same app, you can automatically reward customers with loyalty points the moment they leave a photo review. There is no need for complex third-party integrations or webhooks that might break. This level of loyalty programs that keep customers coming back is achieved through native connectivity.

Furthermore, a consolidated stack improves the customer experience. Instead of seeing three different widgets from three different apps on a product page, the customer interacts with a unified UI. This consistency builds trust and reduces the cognitive load on the shopper. Merchants can verify the impact of this integrated approach by verifying compatibility details in the official app listing before making a transition.

Streamlining Social Proof and Loyalty

Social proof is a major driver of conversion, but it shouldn't exist in a vacuum. By collecting and showcasing authentic customer reviews, merchants provide the evidence new buyers need to feel confident. When these reviews are tied to a loyalty program, the motivation for customers to provide high-quality content (like photos or videos) increases.

When comparing plan fit against retention goals, merchants often find that the total cost of an integrated platform is more sustainable than paying for four or five separate "Basic" or "Growth" plans from different developers. This financial efficiency allows for more budget to be allocated toward customer acquisition or product development. By checking merchant feedback and app-store performance signals, it is evident that many businesses prioritize this consolidated workflow as they move from the early stages of growth to more advanced operations.

Practical Success with Unified Tools

Looking at real examples from brands improving retention shows that the most successful stores focus on the relationship with the customer rather than the management of the tools. An integrated system allows for VIP tiers and incentives for high-intent customers to be managed alongside review automation that builds trust at purchase time. This holistic view of the customer journey is difficult to achieve when data is spread across multiple disconnected databases.

If consolidating tools is a priority, start by evaluating feature coverage across plans.

Conclusion

For merchants choosing between BON Loyalty Program & Rewards and Essent Loyalty Program Rewards, the decision comes down to the specific technical requirements of the storefront and the desired depth of the loyalty program. BON Loyalty Program & Rewards is the clear choice for brands that require omnichannel capabilities via Shopify POS, B2B-specific tiers, or the technical flexibility of a headless commerce environment. Its lower review count (1) suggests it may be a newer or more niche offering, but its feature set is undeniably powerful for complex operations.

On the other hand, Essent Loyalty Program Rewards offers a highly proven and accessible solution. With 368 reviews and a 5.0 rating, it has established itself as a reliable partner for merchants who want a straightforward, widget-based loyalty and referral program that is easy to customize and manage. It is particularly well-suited for smaller stores that need VIP tiers and referrals without a high price tag or technical setup.

However, as a brand matures, the strategic shift from individual apps to an integrated retention platform often becomes necessary to maintain growth without increasing operational friction. By moving toward a clearer view of total retention-stack costs, merchants can eliminate the data silos and inconsistent user experiences that often plague stores with too many specialized plugins. An integrated approach ensures that loyalty, reviews, and referrals work in harmony to maximize customer lifetime value.

To reduce app fatigue and run retention from one place, start by reviewing the Shopify App Store listing merchants install from.

FAQ

Which app is better for a Shopify Plus store?

For Shopify Plus merchants, BON Loyalty Program & Rewards offers specific advantages such as points at checkout and full API/SDK access. These features allow Plus merchants to leverage their more advanced checkout capabilities and build custom loyalty experiences. However, merchants on Plus who are looking to consolidate their entire retention stack (including reviews and wishlists) may find an all-in-one platform more efficient for managing high-volume operations.

Can I migrate my existing loyalty data to these apps?

Most loyalty applications on Shopify, including BON and Essent, provide tools or support for importing customer point balances from other platforms. This is typically done via CSV upload. BON Loyalty mentions customization and support services that can assist with more complex migrations, which is helpful if you are moving from a legacy system.

How does an all-in-one platform compare to specialized apps?

Specialized apps focus on doing one thing—like loyalty—extremely well, often offering niche features like B2B tiers or specific POS integrations. An all-in-one platform, however, provides a suite of tools (loyalty, reviews, wishlist, referrals) that are natively designed to work together. This integration reduces the need for multiple scripts on your site, simplifies your billing, and ensures that customer data flows seamlessly between different marketing functions, ultimately providing a more consistent experience for your shoppers.

Is a referral program included in the free plans of both apps?

Yes, both BON Loyalty and Essent Loyalty include referral program functionality in their free tiers. Essent Loyalty allows for referral link generation and discount rewards for up to 150 orders on the free plan. BON Loyalty includes an "Anti-Cheat" referral program on its free tier, focusing on protecting the merchant from fraudulent reward claims right from the start.