If you're running a Shopify store and looking for a loyalty platform, Marsello probably landed on your radar. It has been operating for years and positions itself around omnichannel loyalty, POS, ecommerce, and marketing. But the ecommerce landscape has changed significantly, particularly as Shopify has moved merchants toward checkout extensibility and Shopify Functions. For Shopify-first brands, the key question is whether Marsello's omnichannel model, per-site pricing, and optional Marketing and SMS add-ons fit better than a retention platform built specifically around Shopify. Modern alternatives like Rivo's loyalty program focus on Shopify-native loyalty, referrals, checkout experiences, memberships, accounts, and related retention tools. Shopify has sunset legacy checkout.liquid functionality across the main checkout and Shopify Scripts ceased executing on June 30, 2026.
This review breaks down Marsello's features, pricing, limitations, and how it compares with a Shopify-focused alternative so you can make an informed decision for your retention strategy.
Key Takeaways
- Marsello's Loyalty Launch plan starts at $60 USD per month per site, while Loyalty Accelerate starts at $120 USD per month per site. Marketing and SMS are optional add-ons.
- Marsello supports Shopify ecommerce, Shopify POS, Shopify Plus, Shopify's new customer accounts, and a Shopify Plus loyalty Rewards Block at checkout.
- VIP tiers and API access are available on Marsello's Loyalty Accelerate plan rather than Loyalty Launch.
- Rivo's current core pricing starts at $49+ per month on Scale, while Plus is $499 per month and Enterprise is custom-priced. Total Rivo cost can also depend on the products a merchant chooses.
- Rivo is built around Shopify retention and currently advertises eight checkout extensions, 50+ integrations, paid memberships, customer accounts, referrals, and a Developer Toolkit.
Understanding Loyalty Programs: What to Look for in 2026
The loyalty platform market has matured considerably. What brands need now isn't just a points program. It's a retention system that integrates with the existing tech stack, supports measurable customer engagement, and fits the merchant's operating model.
Core capabilities to evaluate:
- Checkout integration
- VIP tier programs
- Referral programs and fraud controls
- Paid membership options where relevant
- Email and SMS integrations
- Developer APIs for customization
- Transparent, understandable pricing
Platform architecture also matters. Shopify has phased out legacy checkout customization approaches such as checkout.liquid, and Shopify Scripts stopped executing on June 30, 2026. Shopify now directs merchants and developers toward checkout extensibility and Shopify Functions.
Checkout performance remains commercially important. Baymard's current dataset puts the average documented ecommerce cart abandonment rate at 70.22%, although not all abandonment is caused by checkout design or technology.
Marsello vs. Rivo: Comparing Shopify Loyalty Apps
Marsello positions itself as an omnichannel loyalty platform that can connect ecommerce and POS environments while adding email and SMS marketing. Rivo takes a more Shopify-focused approach centered on loyalty, referrals, memberships, accounts, cashback, and other retention touchpoints.
Why Shopify-Native Architecture Matters
Marsello is not limited to Shopify. Its official integration documentation supports Shopify and Shopify POS alongside platforms such as Lightspeed, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and others. That breadth can be useful for retailers operating across different commerce systems.
Importantly, Marsello does support modern Shopify checkout functionality. Shopify Plus merchants can install Marsello's Rewards Block checkout extension to show loyalty balances and let eligible customers apply rewards from checkout.
Rivo is more narrowly focused on Shopify retention. Its current pricing page advertises eight checkout extensions, while its developer documentation highlights Shopify-native metafields, Shopify Flow, APIs, and checkout-integrated loyalty.
Key technical differences:
- Marsello supports a Shopify Plus loyalty Rewards Block at checkout.
- Rivo advertises eight checkout extensions across its retention platform.
- Marsello supports multiple ecommerce and POS ecosystems, while Rivo's product strategy is centered specifically on Shopify.
- Rivo supports Shopify Flow, REST API, JavaScript API, webhooks, and Shopify metafields through its Developer Toolkit.
Technical Advantages: APIs and Developer Tools
For brands with development resources, API access can become important.
Marsello's REST API is unlocked on the Loyalty Accelerate plan. It allows merchants and developers to build custom integrations around Marsello loyalty and marketing data.
Rivo provides a Developer Toolkit that includes a REST API, JavaScript API, metafields, webhooks, and Shopify Flow tooling. Its developer page also displays scale metrics including 99.98% API uptime, 2.9 billion API calls annually, and 850+ development teams, although Rivo explicitly labels those figures as metrics referenced from August 2024.
Building Effective Loyalty Programs: Features and Customization
Both platforms support points-based loyalty, but their plan structures and broader product strategies differ.
Marsello's loyalty features include:
- Points and rewards
- Customer referrals
- Branded customer portal
- Apple and Google Wallet
- Loyalty automations
- RFM segmentation
- Customer feedback surveys
- Reporting and analytics
Marsello's Loyalty Accelerate plan adds VIP tiers, advanced referrals, advanced reward conditions, custom earn options, points promotions, custom segmentation, product and collection sync, API access, and additional integrations.
Areas where Rivo takes a different approach include:
- Eight advertised checkout extensions
- Paid memberships
- Shopify-focused customer accounts
- Cashback and store credit functionality
- 20+ built-in fraud-protection tools
- Developer Toolkit with APIs, metafields and webhooks
Beyond Points: VIP Tiers and Cashback
VIP tiers are supported by both platforms. Marsello places VIP tiers on Loyalty Accelerate, where merchants can create multiple tiers and define entry requirements and tier-specific rewards.
Rivo also supports VIP tiers based on amount spent, orders placed, or points earned and offers cashback and store-credit functionality alongside traditional points programs.
Rivo has published customer outcomes around VIP programs, including Kitsch reporting an 8.7x higher repeat purchase rate for its top VIP tier. These figures should be understood as individual Rivo customer results, not guarantees of performance for every merchant.
Ensuring Program Integrity with Fraud Prevention
Referral fraud controls become more important as referral volume grows.
Marsello includes Basic referrals on Loyalty Launch and Advanced referrals on Loyalty Accelerate.
Rivo separately advertises more than 20 built-in fraud-protection tools for its loyalty and referral programs. Its pricing page describes fraud and bot protection as part of its security and infrastructure capabilities.
For a Shopify brand comparing the two, the relevant question is therefore not whether Marsello has referrals. It does. The question is how much referral control, fraud tooling, checkout integration, and customization the specific program requires.
Beyond Loyalty: Referral Marketing and Paid Memberships
Retention isn't limited to points. Some brands combine loyalty with referral programs, memberships, cashback, store credit, and other incentives.
Boosting Acquisition with Smart Referrals
Marsello includes customer referrals on both current loyalty plans, with Basic referrals on Loyalty Launch and Advanced referrals on Loyalty Accelerate.
Rivo focuses heavily on referrals as a separate retention and acquisition capability, including dedicated referral pages, post-purchase touchpoints, multi-tier referral functionality, and built-in fraud protection.
Driving Recurring Revenue with Paid Memberships
Marsello's current public loyalty pricing and feature documentation does not position native paid memberships as a core product offering. Brands for which paid membership is a central requirement should confirm any available implementation directly with Marsello rather than assuming it is included.
Rivo offers native paid memberships. Its current documentation supports recurring membership pricing and configurable billing intervals and benefits.
This makes Rivo particularly relevant for Shopify brands that want loyalty and a paid membership layer within the same retention platform.
Seamless Customer Experience: Accounts and Integrations
Customer accounts are where many loyalty interactions happen day to day.
Personalized Customer Accounts
Marsello supports Shopify's new customer accounts and says no Marsello-specific migration is required when a merchant switches from classic to new Shopify customer accounts. It also offers a branded customer portal for loyalty and rewards.
Rivo offers Shopify customer accounts as a dedicated product area. Its current pricing page lists Accounts starting at $499 per month and describes capabilities including shareable wishlists, Apple and Google Wallet passes, passwordless login, personalization, recently viewed products, saved carts, and unified subscription and returns experiences.
That distinction matters when comparing costs. Rivo Accounts should not be represented as automatically included within the $49 Scale loyalty price.
Integrations and Data Sync
Marsello connects with Shopify, Shopify POS, Shopify Plus and multiple other POS and ecommerce platforms. Its broader product strategy is designed for merchants coordinating online and physical retail.
Rivo currently advertises 50+ integrations, including integrations across email, SMS, subscriptions, reviews, support, mobile commerce, returns, and other Shopify ecosystem categories.
Marsello Limitations: When Rivo May Be the Better Fit
Marsello can be a strong fit for omnichannel retailers that want to coordinate POS, ecommerce, loyalty, email, SMS, and wallet experiences. For Shopify-first brands, however, there are a few trade-offs to consider:
- Per-site pricing can add up for multi-location retailers. Marsello prices loyalty per site, and ecommerce and POS locations can count separately. Marketing and SMS are also separate add-ons. Rivo's pricing is structured mainly around monthly order volume for its core loyalty plans, although products such as Accounts and Cashback have separate pricing.
- Some advanced Marsello features require Loyalty Accelerate. VIP tiers, advanced referrals, custom earn options, points promotions, API access, and certain loyalty integrations are not included in Loyalty Launch. Shopify merchants should compare the exact features they need rather than looking only at starting prices.
- Marsello is built for a broader omnichannel use case. That flexibility can benefit retailers operating across ecommerce and physical locations. Rivo, by contrast, is focused specifically on Shopify and Shopify Plus, with a Shopify loyalty platform designed around Shopify checkout, customer accounts, Shopify Flow, and other Shopify-native workflows.
- Rivo offers deeper Shopify-focused developer tooling. Rivo's Developer Toolkit includes REST API access, JavaScript API, Liquid metafields, webhooks, and Shopify Flow capabilities, making it a stronger fit for brands planning custom loyalty experiences or developer-led retention programs.
- Rivo covers more Shopify retention use cases under one platform. Beyond loyalty, Rivo supports referral programs, paid memberships, customer accounts, cashback, store credit, wallet passes, and wishlists. This can make Rivo a better fit for Shopify-first DTC brands that expect their retention strategy to expand beyond points and rewards.
Marsello may still be the better choice for retailers that prioritize coordinated POS and ecommerce loyalty with built-in marketing tools. But for Shopify-first brands that want deeper checkout integration, more developer flexibility, and a broader retention stack, Rivo may be better aligned with long-term growth.
Pricing and ROI: Evaluating Loyalty Software
Marsello's pricing deserves close attention because its billing model differs from order-volume-based Shopify loyalty platforms.
Marsello Pricing and Add-On Costs
Marsello currently publishes the following structure:
- Loyalty Launch starts at $60 USD per month per site.
- Loyalty Accelerate starts at $120 USD per month per site.
- Enterprise uses custom pricing.
- Marketing is an optional $15 USD add-on.
- SMS is listed at $0.028 USD per credit.
Marsello defines a site as a location where sales take place. An ecommerce store and a physical store can therefore count as separate sites.
This does not inherently make Marsello expensive. It means merchants should calculate costs according to their actual site footprint and the add-ons they intend to use.
Rivo Pricing
Rivo's pricing currently shows Scale at $49+ per month, with pricing ranging from $49 to $499 depending on order volume. Scale covers 200 to 2,500 monthly orders. Plus is $499 per month for up to 2,500 monthly orders, and Enterprise/Custom pricing supports unlimited order volume.
Rivo also has product-specific pricing outside that core loyalty comparison. Its current page lists Cashback starting at $199 per month and Accounts starting at $499 per month, while a custom retention stack can combine Loyalty, Referrals, Memberships, Cashback, and Accounts.
That is why the fairest pricing comparison is based on the exact retention stack a merchant intends to deploy rather than starting price alone.
Measuring True Return on Investment
ROI should ultimately be measured against a merchant's own incremental revenue, reward cost, software cost, operational cost, and customer behavior.
Published vendor case studies can provide useful examples, but they are not industry benchmarks or guaranteed results. Rivo reports performance metrics across its customer stories and has described a 52x weighted median ROI based on its own case-study data. That number should be understood as self-reported rather than an independent industry average.
For merchants evaluating either platform, a better approach is to establish a baseline for repeat purchase rate, redemption rate, loyalty-attributed revenue, referral revenue, reward cost, and customer lifetime value before launch and measure changes against those metrics.
Optimizing Email Marketing with Loyalty Integration
Marsello's Marketing add-on allows merchants to coordinate email marketing and loyalty within the same platform. Its official pricing page lists email campaigns, marketing automation, custom automations, conditional splits, AI content suggestions, marketing analytics, and related functionality under the Marketing add-on.
Leveraging Loyalty Data with Dedicated Email Platforms
Some Shopify brands instead prefer to keep a dedicated email or SMS platform and synchronize loyalty information into it.
Rivo supports integrations with platforms including Klaviyo, Attentive and Postscript as part of its broader integration ecosystem. Its current pricing page describes both Basic and Advanced Klaviyo integration levels.
Neither architecture is universally better. The tradeoff is between consolidating more customer marketing functionality into Marsello and using specialized marketing platforms connected to a Shopify-focused retention system.
Automating Customer Journeys with Integrated Platforms
Rivo officially supports Shopify Flow for workflows involving earning rules, tiers, and other connected apps.
For Shopify merchants building automation-heavy retention programs, Flow support and API capabilities are worth evaluating alongside the platform's out-of-the-box marketing automation.
Scalability and Enterprise Features
For growing brands, scalability matters. The right questions include API access, checkout functionality, migration support, customer success resources, security, fraud controls, and the ability to handle the merchant's required order volume.
Meeting the Demands of High-Growth Brands
Marsello's Enterprise tier includes unlimited order volume, custom sites and database size, tailored onboarding, a dedicated Success Manager, priority technical support, secure API access, and access to marketing add-ons.
Rivo's Custom tier lists unlimited order volume, unrestricted Developer Toolkit access, technical account management, Slack Connect, increased API rate limits, and other enterprise services.
Security and Reliability for Enterprise Operations
Rivo's current pricing page states that it is SOC 2 Type II compliant and that a data processing agreement is available on every plan.
Rivo's developer page also reports 99.98% API uptime and 2.9 billion API calls per year, but the page explicitly notes that these metrics are referenced from August 2024. They are useful historical indicators rather than independently verified 2026 uptime statistics.
Why Rivo May Be the Right Choice for Your Shopify Store
If you're evaluating Marsello, the decision should come down to operating model rather than a claim that one platform is universally superior.
Marsello has meaningful strengths. It supports ecommerce and POS, modern Shopify customer accounts, Shopify Plus checkout rewards, digital wallet functionality, referrals, VIP tiers on Loyalty Accelerate, RFM segmentation, and optional built-in email and SMS marketing.
Rivo becomes particularly compelling when a brand's roadmap is tightly centered on Shopify. Its Shopify loyalty platform combines loyalty with referral programs, paid memberships, and Shopify customer accounts, while also supporting checkout extensions, Shopify Flow, APIs, webhooks, metafields, fraud-protection tools, and a broad integration ecosystem.
Pricing should still be evaluated carefully. Rivo's Scale loyalty plan begins at $49+, Plus is $499, and Enterprise is custom, while products such as Accounts and Cashback have separate starting prices. Merchants can review the current details on Rivo's pricing page. Marsello starts at $60 per site for Loyalty Launch and $120 per site for Loyalty Accelerate, with Marketing and SMS sold separately.
For Shopify-first DTC brands, Rivo's tighter focus on Shopify checkout, customer accounts, developer tooling, memberships, and interconnected retention products may provide a better long-term fit. Omnichannel retailers that want loyalty, POS, ecommerce, email, and SMS managed within the Marsello ecosystem may reach a different conclusion.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the main pricing difference between Marsello and Rivo?
Marsello currently prices Loyalty Launch from $60 per month per site and Loyalty Accelerate from $120 per month per site, with Marketing and SMS available as separate add-ons. Rivo's core Scale plan starts at $49+ and ranges up to $499 according to order volume, Plus is $499, and Enterprise is custom-priced. Rivo also prices certain additional products separately, including Accounts from $499 per month and Cashback from $199 per month, so merchants should compare the complete configuration they need rather than starting prices alone.
Does Marsello work with Shopify's new checkout features?
Yes. Marsello supports a Shopify Plus Rewards Block checkout extension that can show customers their loyalty balance and available rewards and let eligible signed-in customers apply rewards during checkout. Rivo also provides checkout integration and currently advertises eight checkout extensions, so the difference is better described as the breadth and design of the respective checkout experiences rather than Marsello lacking checkout extensibility.
How long does it take to migrate from Marsello to another platform?
Migration time depends on the size and complexity of the loyalty program, customer and points data, integrations, design requirements, and testing process. Rivo publishes at least one customer example showing a 24-hour migration turnaround, but that should not be treated as an average or guarantee for every Marsello migration.
Can I run a paid membership program on Marsello?
Marsello's current public loyalty pricing and feature documentation does not position a native recurring paid-membership product as a core loyalty feature, so merchants that require paid membership should confirm available options directly with Marsello. Rivo does offer native paid memberships with recurring billing and configurable membership benefits.
Is Marsello's built-in email marketing the same type of product as Klaviyo?
Marsello's optional Marketing add-on includes email campaigns, marketing automation, custom automations, conditional splits, analytics, and related tools, so describing it simply as “basic email” would be misleading. Klaviyo is a dedicated marketing platform with a broader product scope, while Marsello's advantage is that loyalty and marketing can operate within the same system. Shopify brands that prefer a specialized marketing stack can instead connect loyalty data through integrations such as Rivo's Klaviyo integration.
