Your customers have loyalty points sitting in your Smile.io or Growave program. They’ve earned them by shopping, leaving reviews, and referring friends. The question is: what do they actually want to spend those points on?
Discount codes are fine. Free shipping is expected. But a growing segment of shoppers wants something that means more than a dollar off their next order. They want to know their loyalty actually did something good.
That’s where GoodAPI comes in.
The Gap Most Loyalty Programs Are Missing
Loyalty programs are everywhere. Most major Shopify brands run one. But the standard reward catalog — discounts, free products, early access — doesn’t differentiate you from every other store running the same playbook.
Research from Eagle Eye found that 56% of consumers say sustainability is extremely or very important to their purchasing decisions. Yet nearly half of all loyalty programs they belong to don’t offer a single sustainability-related reward.
That’s the gap. And it’s an easy one to close.
When a customer redeems 500 points and sees “10 trees planted in Kenya in your name,” that moment creates a memory. It creates an emotional connection to your brand that a 10% discount simply cannot. And with GoodAPI, each of those trees is tracked, geolocated, and photographed through Veritree — so the impact is real, not a vague donation to an unnamed fund.
How Smile.io + GoodAPI Works
Smile.io is the most widely installed loyalty app in the Shopify ecosystem, with over 100,000 stores running points, VIP tiers, and referral programs on the platform.
The integration with GoodAPI works through Shopify’s native “Free Product” reward type. Here’s the concept: you create a product called something like “Plant 10 Trees,” price it at $4.30 (10 trees at $0.43 each), tag it with a special GoodAPI tracking tag, and then add it to your Smile.io rewards catalog. When a customer redeems their points for that product, GoodAPI automatically fulfills the environmental impact.
No subscriptions. No fixed monthly fees. You only pay for the trees your customers actually plant.
Setting Up Smile.io Tree Planting
Activate GoodAPI with Monthly Fixed Impact
Install the GoodAPI app from the Shopify App Store and choose your impact type (tree planting, ocean-bound plastic removal, or both). Set your monthly spend limit as a ceiling — this ensures you won’t be charged more than your budget regardless of how many points customers redeem. Select “Monthly Fixed Impact” mode if you only want impact to happen through loyalty redemptions, not automatically per order.
Create a Reward Product in Shopify
Go to Products in your Shopify admin and create a new product — for example, “Plant 10 Trees.” Set the price to $4.30 (10 trees at $0.43 each). Mark it as a digital product with no shipping, and add the GoodAPI tracking tag: goodapi-10-trees. For plastic removal, use goodapi-10-plastics. The GoodAPI team can provide ready-to-use product descriptions and images through the in-app chat.
Add It as a Free Product Reward in Smile.io
Open your Smile.io app and go to Program, then Redeem Points. Click “Add a way to redeem” and choose “Free product.” Select the product you just created, assign the number of points required, and save. The reward will now appear in your Smile.io Loyalty Hub.
Watch Customers Redeem and GoodAPI Fulfill
When a customer redeems points, Smile.io generates a discount code. They apply it at checkout, the product order completes, and GoodAPI automatically updates their Sustainability Hub — showing them their personal trees planted, where they are growing, and the broader brand impact.
How Growave + GoodAPI Works
Growave takes the integration one step further with two distinct connection modes: redeemable rewards (like Smile.io) and automated Flow triggers.
Growave is a popular all-in-one retention platform for Shopify brands, combining loyalty programs, wishlists, reviews, and UGC in one app. Their GoodAPI integration was built specifically to let merchants tie environmental impact to customer actions beyond just spending.
Option 1: Redeemable Sustainability Rewards
The setup is similar to Smile.io. You create a “Plant 10 Trees” product in Shopify with the GoodAPI tracking tag, then add it as a “Free product” reward inside Growave’s Points program. Customers see it in the rewards catalog and redeem points to trigger the planting.
Growave’s integration supports both tree planting and plastic removal, and the customer’s impact is tracked in the GoodAPI Sustainability Hub just the same.
Option 2: Automated Tree Planting via Shopify Flow
This is where Growave gets interesting. You can set up a Shopify Flow workflow so that every time a customer leaves a product review through Growave, a tree is automatically planted — no redemption required.
The Flow trigger is “Someone left a review!” from Growave. The action is GoodAPI’s “Plant trees” action, where you specify how many trees to plant per review. Once you enable the workflow, it runs silently in the background.
This automation creates a powerful compounding effect: customers leave reviews because they want the impact, your store accumulates more social proof, and your GoodAPI Sustainability Hub grows with every review submitted.
Comparing the Two Integrations
| Feature | Smile.io | Growave |
|---|---|---|
| Redeemable tree planting rewards | Yes | Yes |
| Automated tree planting via reviews | No (use Shopify Flow separately) | Yes (built-in Flow trigger) |
| Plastic removal rewards | Yes | Yes |
| Customer Sustainability Hub | Yes | Yes |
| Shopify POS support | Yes | Yes |
| Best for | Brands already on Smile.io | Brands wanting loyalty + reviews together |
Both integrations use GoodAPI’s verified reforestation infrastructure through Veritree. The trees are GPS-tracked, geolocated in real planting sites across Kenya, Madagascar, and Brazil, and supported through their critical early growth years.
Why This Works Better Than Discount-Only Rewards
31% of consumers actively want sustainability-focused rewards from the loyalty programs they’re in. That’s a substantial segment who will actively prefer your program over competitors’ programs that only offer discount codes.
The emotional mechanism is also different. When a customer redeems a discount, they get a transient financial benefit. When they redeem points to plant trees, they get a story they can tell: “I’ve planted 47 trees through [your brand].” That number is visible in their GoodAPI Sustainability Hub, updated in real time, complete with photos and videos from the planting sites.
That kind of tangible, trackable impact builds a different kind of loyalty than any coupon can.
GoodAPI’s Pricing Model Makes This Viable
One reason loyalty-linked tree planting hasn’t been more common is that most tree planting apps charge monthly subscriptions regardless of how much impact you create. If a brand pays $49/month but only plants 50 trees, the cost per tree becomes nearly a dollar — hard to justify as a loyalty reward.
GoodAPI’s model is different. There’s no monthly fee. You pay $0.43 per tree, period. If your loyalty program drives 1,000 tree redemptions in a month, you pay $430. If it drives 50, you pay $21.50. You can even set a monthly spend cap so the cost is always predictable.
This makes GoodAPI a practical fit as a loyalty reward: the unit economics work at any scale.
Shopify merchants running Smile.io or Growave who want to add a meaningful sustainability reward without committing to a subscription
Getting Started
Both integrations are documented in GoodAPI’s help center. The Smile.io setup guide includes a video walkthrough, and the Growave guide covers both the redeemable reward path and the Shopify Flow automation in detail.
GoodAPI has a 5.0-star rating from over 200 reviews on the Shopify App Store and carries the Built for Shopify badge, meaning the integration is reliable, maintained, and built to Shopify’s technical standards.
If you’re already running Smile.io or Growave, adding a tree planting reward is one of the lowest-effort improvements you can make to your loyalty program. Setup takes less than 30 minutes, and the only ongoing cost is $0.43 per tree your customers plant.
Your customers are already engaged enough to earn loyalty points. Give them something worth redeeming them for.
Add GoodAPI to your Shopify store and connect it to your loyalty program today.
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