Migrating a loyalty program from an API-first platform such as Open Loyalty to a Shopify-focused retention platform requires careful data mapping, feature validation, integration planning, and testing. Rivo's loyalty platform provides loyalty, referrals, memberships, customer accounts, checkout touchpoints, Shopify POS support, integrations, and developer tools for Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants. Rivo also provides migration and replatform assistance, but the schedule and scope of an Open Loyalty migration should be confirmed through a technical assessment.
Key Takeaways
- Open Loyalty is an API-first, headless loyalty engine, so merchants are responsible for connecting the platform to their required storefronts, apps, POS systems, and other customer touchpoints.
- Rivo publishes pricing for individual products and plan configurations. Its pricing page currently lists Cashback from $199 per month, Accounts from $499 per month, and custom pricing for broader retention bundles. A comparison section also lists Scale from $49 per month and Plus at $499 per month.
- Rivo offers more than 150 platform features and more than 50 integrations, according to its current pricing and integrations pages.
- Rivo provides eight checkout extensions, Shopify POS support, VIP tiers, loyalty and referral programs, paid loyalty tiers, and developer tools.
- Rivo's CSV import supports points balances, credit balances, birthdates, VIP tiers, and activation dates. A separate importer supports historical points and credit transactions.
- Rivo provides migration and replatform assistance. Partners Coffee's published migration from Inveterate took three weeks, although an Open Loyalty migration may have a different scope and schedule.
- Merchants should obtain a written feature matrix, field map, test plan, pricing proposal, and launch schedule before committing to a migration.
Why Brands Should Consider Migrating from Open Loyalty to Rivo
Open Loyalty describes itself as an API-first, headless loyalty engine. Its architecture separates loyalty logic from the presentation layer and allows web, mobile, POS, and other frontends to interact with the platform through APIs. This model can be appropriate for enterprises that want to build loyalty experiences across multiple systems and have the technical resources to connect and maintain those touchpoints.
For Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants, a Shopify-focused retention platform may reduce the amount of custom storefront and checkout work required. The actual difference depends on the merchant's current Open Loyalty implementation, theme architecture, POS setup, mobile app, data warehouse, marketing stack, and custom program rules.
Assessing the Technical Tradeoffs
The main distinction is not that Open Loyalty is inherently outdated or unsuitable. It is that Open Loyalty offers a platform-agnostic, headless architecture, while Rivo concentrates on Shopify retention experiences and integrations.
A merchant evaluating a switch should document every existing Open Loyalty function, including earning rules, rewards, currencies, tiers, referrals, campaigns, customer segments, expiration rules, adjustments, integrations, API workflows, webhooks, POS behavior, mobile experiences, and reporting requirements. That inventory should then be compared with Rivo's current product and plan documentation.
Modern Shopify Loyalty Architecture
Shopify has retired several legacy checkout customization methods. checkout.liquid is unsupported for the main Information, Shipping, and Payment steps, and legacy Thank you and Order status page customizations were sunset beginning August 28, 2025. Shopify Scripts were deactivated on June 30, 2026, and merchants must use supported alternatives such as Shopify Functions and checkout extensions.
Rivo's pricing page states that the platform provides eight checkout extensions and Shopify-focused storefront components. This can help merchants build loyalty touchpoints through Shopify's current extension framework. Merchants should still test every component in a development or staging environment and verify compatibility with their checkout, theme, markets, subscriptions, discounts, tracking, and accessibility requirements.
Understanding Rivo's Shopify Loyalty Features
Rivo combines loyalty, referrals, memberships, cashback or store credit, customer accounts, and related retention experiences. Availability and limits vary by product and plan, so merchants should not assume that every feature is included in every configuration.
Designing Loyalty Programs with Rivo
Rivo's current pricing and product materials describe configurable points programs, custom earning actions, rewards, VIP tiers, points expiry, store credit, cashback, loyalty landing pages, customer profile management, transactional emails, and analytics.
VIP tiers can be configured using points earned, amount spent, number of orders placed, or products purchased. Rivo's Help Center says merchants can create up to six tiers and choose lifetime, calendar-year, or rolling-year qualification windows.
Rivo also says that its platform includes more than 150 features. This is a company-reported feature count rather than a guarantee that every feature is applicable to every merchant or included in every plan.
Checkout and In-Store Loyalty
Rivo's pricing page lists eight checkout extensions. These can be used to place supported loyalty and retention components within Shopify's extensible checkout experience.
Rivo also supports Shopify POS. The current pricing comparison lists three POS locations for Scale and unlimited locations for Plus and Enterprise. Merchants should confirm how earning, redemption, discounts, credits, refunds, exchanges, customer identification, and offline behavior work in their particular POS configuration.
Rivo Referrals, Memberships, and Accounts
Rivo provides referral, membership, and customer-account capabilities that can be combined with its loyalty product.
Referral Programs and Fraud Controls
Rivo Referrals supports referral campaigns and customer rewards. Rivo's pricing page says the platform includes more than 20 built-in fraud-protection tools as well as bot protection.
Merchants should review the current referral documentation to confirm the specific controls available for self-referrals, duplicate households, IP addresses, cookies, order status, minimum purchase requirements, cancellations, returns, and reward approval.
Paid and Free Memberships
Rivo Memberships supports paid loyalty tiers and membership experiences that can be combined with Shopify checkout and customer-account touchpoints. The current pricing page describes a Shopify-native paid membership platform and paid loyalty tiers.
Membership eligibility, payment requirements, billing behavior, discount compatibility, cancellation flows, supported countries, and Shopify plan requirements should be confirmed during product evaluation.
Customer Accounts
Rivo Accounts provides personalized account experiences. Rivo's current pricing page lists shareable wishlists and favorites, Apple and Google Wallet passes, passwordless login and signup, customer-account personalization, recently viewed products, saved carts, zero-party data collection, direct email and SMS integrations, and unified subscription and returns portals.
The exact account components, supported providers, implementation effort, and plan availability should be documented in the merchant's feature matrix.
Rivo's Developer Toolkit
Rivo's Developer Toolkit includes REST API, JavaScript API, Shopify metafields, and webhooks. These tools can support custom storefront displays, event-driven integrations, external systems, and specialized program logic.
The current pricing page says increased API rate limits can reach up to 100 requests per second. It also describes reserved endpoints and five-times API rate limits for Custom plans. Merchants should obtain written confirmation of their applicable limits, authentication model, endpoint access, webhook behavior, retry rules, batch-processing options, support coverage, and rate-limit escalation process.
Shopify Flow can also be used to create workflows involving loyalty earning, tiers, and connected applications.
The Migration Process: Switching from Open Loyalty to Rivo
Rivo provides migration and replatform assistance. However, the article should not present a fixed one-to-three-week schedule as a guarantee for Open Loyalty migrations.
Partners Coffee's official Rivo case study reports a three-week migration from Inveterate. Open Loyalty has a different architecture and data model, so its migration scope must be evaluated separately.
Step 1: Inventory the Existing Open Loyalty Program
Document the current program's customer identifiers, points currencies, balances, pending points, expired points, credit balances, tiers, qualification windows, campaigns, coupons, referrals, achievements, segments, reward inventory, custom attributes, earning and spending rules, API integrations, webhook consumers, POS behavior, mobile functionality, and reporting dependencies.
The merchant should also determine which records must remain available after launch, including transaction history, adjustment notes, referral relationships, campaign history, reward history, consent records, and customer-facing activity logs.
Step 2: Build a Data-Field Map
Rivo's general loyalty-data CSV importer accepts Email, Points Balance, Birthdate, VIP Tier, Activation Date, and Credits Balance. Tier names must match the configured Rivo tier names.
Rivo also provides a separate Points Logs importer for historical points and credit transactions. That importer can preserve transaction amounts, timestamps, notes, source values, order IDs, expiration dates, and certain related identifiers for existing Rivo customer records.
Not every Open Loyalty object will necessarily have a direct Rivo equivalent. The migration team should classify each field as directly supported, transformable, archivable outside Rivo, or excluded.
Step 3: Configure the Rivo Program
The merchant should configure earning rules, rewards, VIP tiers, qualification periods, expiration settings, referral rules, customer communications, account components, checkout extensions, POS behavior, integrations, and reporting before importing production data.
The program should be tested with sample customers representing different balances, tiers, countries, currencies, order histories, subscriptions, referral states, and account types.
Step 4: Import and Validate Data
Rivo's Help Center says small CSV files with fewer than 100 rows typically process in under a minute, while files with thousands of records can take several minutes. Processing time depends on file size.
Validation should compare source and destination record counts, points totals, credit totals, tier assignments, birthdates, activation dates, historical transactions, expiration dates, and a statistically meaningful sample of individual customer profiles.
Step 5: Test Integrations and Customer Journeys
Before launch, test the Shopify storefront, checkout, customer accounts, Shopify POS, transactional emails, Klaviyo or other messaging integrations, subscriptions, reviews, returns, mobile apps, support tools, analytics, and custom API workflows.
The team should also verify reward redemption, discounts, credits, refunds, cancellations, exchanges, duplicate customers, guest checkout, account activation, and error handling.
Step 6: Launch and Monitor
The launch plan should define the data freeze, final delta import, ownership of each task, rollback criteria, customer communications, support coverage, monitoring dashboards, incident escalation process, and post-launch reconciliation.
A merchant should not describe the transition as having “zero customer disruption” until that outcome has been measured after launch.
Rivo Integrations
Rivo publishes more than 50 integrations across email, SMS, reviews, subscriptions, support, returns, mobile apps, analytics, and Shopify automation.
Its integration directory includes services such as Klaviyo, Postscript, Attentive, Sendlane, Omnisend, Gorgias, Zendesk, Gladly, Recharge, Skio, Smartrr, Loop, Okendo, Judge.me, Junip, Loox, Tapcart, Fuego, Shopify Flow, and Shopify POS.
The existence of an integration page does not establish that every event or workflow is bidirectional. Merchants should document supported objects, event direction, sync frequency, failure handling, historical backfill, plan requirements, and implementation responsibilities.
Klaviyo Integration
The current pricing page distinguishes between basic and advanced Klaviyo integration. It says the advanced integration passes events and data that can be used for segmentation and flows.
Merchants should verify the exact events and properties supported, whether each sync is inbound or outbound, and how consent, profile merges, deletions, and historical data are handled.
Rivo Pricing
Rivo's current pricing page uses both product-led pricing and a plan comparison.
Cashback is listed from $199 per month. Accounts is listed from $499 per month. A broader retention bundle containing Cashback, Accounts, Loyalty, Referrals, and Memberships is priced through a custom proposal.
The comparison section lists Scale from $49 per month, Plus at $499 per month, and Enterprise at custom pricing. Scale is listed for 200 to 2,500 monthly orders, Plus for up to 2,500 monthly orders, and Enterprise for unlimited volume.
Because the Scale price includes a plus sign and the page now promotes separately priced products and custom bundles, merchants should request a written proposal that specifies the selected products, monthly order allowance, POS locations, participants, integrations, API limits, onboarding, migration services, support, additional stores, expansion markets, contract duration, and any implementation fees.
Open Loyalty's current pricing page says its model combines a platform fee with an allowance fee based on monthly active members. Exact terms are established during the commercial agreement.
A valid cost comparison must therefore include more than the visible subscription price. Merchants should compare implementation, custom development, data migration, integration maintenance, support, additional environments, API usage, program operations, and any internal staffing requirements.
Customer Results Published by Rivo
Rivo publishes customer case studies that can help merchants understand possible program designs. These results are specific to each merchant and should not be presented as guaranteed or typical outcomes.
- Rivo's HexClad case study reports more than $450,000 in referral revenue during the first 90 days of the program.
- Rivo's Portland Leather Goods case study reports that loyalty was directly tied to 17.4% of total revenue after the company migrated from Yotpo. The case study also says customer balances were preserved during the transition.
- Rivo's Rylee + Cru case study reports more than $2.4 million in sales from loyalty redemptions and an 8.7-times repeat-purchase rate for VIP customers.
These examples can inform program planning, but a merchant should evaluate the attribution model, comparison group, time period, reward cost, discounts, margin impact, and customer mix before using any case-study result in a business case.
Final Verdict: Making the Switch to Rivo
For brands considering a switch from Open Loyalty, Rivo offers several potentially relevant capabilities.
- Shopify integration: Rivo supports Shopify storefront components, checkout extensions, Shopify Flow, Shopify POS, Shopify Customer Accounts, and other Shopify-focused retention experiences.
- Platform scale: Rivo has published company-reported infrastructure and performance figures. These should be treated as historical company claims rather than independently audited performance guarantees. Merchants should review the applicable SLA, status history, and current Trust Center documentation.
- Migration support: Rivo provides migration and replatform assistance for supported customer and loyalty data. Its general import tools support points balances, credit balances, birthdates, activation dates, VIP tiers, and historical points or credit transactions. An Open Loyalty-specific migration scope should be confirmed directly. Merchants should verify the exact fields, schedule, responsibilities, testing process, historical records, rollback plan, and any applicable implementation fees before starting.
- Retention products: Rivo offers loyalty, referrals, paid loyalty tiers and memberships, customer accounts, cashback or store credit, wallet passes, wishlists, and related retention experiences that can be combined into a broader Shopify stack. Gift-card functionality and other specialized products should be confirmed against the current product configuration.
- Developer flexibility: The Developer Toolkit includes REST API and JavaScript capabilities, along with Shopify metafields and webhooks. Availability, endpoint access, and usage limits vary by plan.
- Published pricing: Rivo's current pricing page lists Cashback from $199 per month, Accounts from $499 per month, and custom pricing for broader retention bundles. Its comparison section also lists Scale from $49 per month and Plus at $499 per month for up to 2,500 monthly orders. Merchants requiring higher volume or a broader product configuration should request a custom quote. Review the current pricing page because limits, trial terms, product packaging, and included features may change.
For Shopify and Shopify Plus brands evaluating a migration, request a demo and ask Rivo to provide a written migration scope, data-field map, feature matrix, pricing proposal, data-validation plan, performance-testing plan, integration matrix, security documentation, support schedule, rollback plan, and launch timeline.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it typically take to switch from Open Loyalty to Rivo?
There is no verified standard timeline for an Open Loyalty-to-Rivo migration. Rivo provides migration and replatform assistance, and its Partners Coffee case study reports a three-week migration from Inveterate. An Open Loyalty implementation may require a different schedule depending on data quality, historical records, custom rules, APIs, integrations, storefronts, POS, mobile apps, approvals, and testing requirements.
Will migrating to Rivo impact website page speed or performance?
The impact cannot be guaranteed in advance. Rivo uses Shopify-focused components such as theme and checkout extensions, but total storefront performance also depends on the merchant's theme, other applications, custom code, third-party scripts, network conditions, and implementation choices. Merchants should run controlled performance tests in a staging environment before and after installing each component.
What support can brands expect during and after migration?
Rivo's current pricing page lists migration and replatform assistance, white-glove onboarding, customer success management, live chat, email support, and Slack support for eligible configurations. The exact support channel, response commitment, training scope, data-migration responsibility, technical account management, and post-launch service level should be included in the written commercial proposal.
How does Rivo's pricing compare with Open Loyalty?
Rivo's current pricing page lists Cashback from $199 per month, Accounts from $499 per month, and custom pricing for broader retention bundles. A comparison section also lists Scale from $49 per month, Plus at $499 per month, and Enterprise at custom pricing. Open Loyalty says its pricing combines a platform fee with an allowance fee based on monthly active members. A reliable comparison should include implementation, migration, integrations, API usage, additional environments, ongoing development, support, internal staffing, and the exact products included.
Can Rivo preserve customers' existing points balances and VIP tier status during migration?
Rivo's CSV import supports points balances, credit balances, birthdates, activation dates, and VIP tier assignments. A separate importer supports historical points and credit transactions. Tier names must match the configured Rivo tiers, and customers generally need to exist in the destination records for historical transaction imports. Merchants should confirm separately whether Open Loyalty referral identifiers, campaign history, coupons, pending points, expired balances, reward history, and other custom objects can be migrated or must be archived outside Rivo.
