How points are earned and spent

The arithmetic is deliberately dull, because a programme somebody has to reverse-engineer is a programme nobody trusts. This page is the whole of it: when points arrive, how many, what happens to them if an order is returned, and what happens when you spend them.

Points arrive when the goods do

A shop awards points when your order is delivered or completed, not when you place it. That is a deliberate choice. Awarding at checkout would mean taking points back from anybody who changed their mind, and a balance that goes backwards a week after you watched it go forwards is a balance you stop reading.

The amount is the shop’s rate applied to its own share of what you spent, rounded down to a whole point. Rounding down rather than up matters: rounding up would award points on money nobody actually spent.

A rate change never rewrites the past

Every award records the rate that produced it. If a shop doubles its rate next month, last month’s order keeps the number it earned and the history keeps saying why. The same is true in the other direction, so a shop lowering its rate cannot quietly reduce what it already gave.

Returns and refunds

If an order is cancelled or refunded, the points it earned are taken back. If you have already spent some of them, only what is left is taken — you are never left owing points to a shop. The remainder is written off by the shop and recorded as such, so both sides can see what happened rather than argue about it.

Spending them

Each programme sets a minimum, so points are spent in useful amounts rather than a few at a time. Taking a reward charges exactly the price the reward carried at that moment, and both the name and the price are written into your history. Pressing the button twice takes one reward: a repeated request is recognised as the same request.

Points do not expire

This is a decision rather than an omission. Expiry is a way for a shop to limit what it is carrying, and doing it fairly means warning people well before the date — which means a reliable way to reach every holder. Until that exists, taking points away on a timer would be taking something from somebody without telling them, so we do not.