Points, store credit and vouchers: one wallet or three ledgers?

Ask a support agent what a given customer “has” and watch them open three tabs: the loyalty app for points, Shopify for store credit, and the discount list for a voucher someone issued after a late delivery. The customer sees the same three fragments on three different pages, if they can find them at all.

What breaks when balances are separate

• A refund reverses the order but not the points it earned.
• A voucher and a points redemption stack on the same order because neither tool knows about the other.
• The account page shows one balance, the email shows another, and support quotes a third.

None of these are edge cases. They are the normal state of a store running separate tools.

What one wallet has to get right

A single balance the customer can see is the goal, but it has to be built on separate ledgers underneath. Points, credit and vouchers have different rules for expiry, transfer and reversal, and an auditor, or a tax adviser, will want to see each one on its own.

The wallet also has to be the place where guards live. A grant that would push a customer past a cap, or stack with an incentive they already received, should be refused by the wallet rather than caught later by a report.

The refund test

The quickest way to judge any wallet is to refund an order and look at what happens. If the points, the credit and the voucher that touched that order are all reversed, with a line in the history saying why, the wallet works. If a person has to fix any of it by hand, it does not.