In Short
Most retention teams measure their loyalty program by repeat purchase rate, redemption rate and lifetime value. Few ask a more basic question first: can every customer actually use it?
A loyalty program gives shoppers more ways to engage with your store than a typical visit. They open the rewards panel, check their points balance, browse rewards, apply a discount at checkout and watch their progress toward the next VIP tier. Each of those moments should work just as well with a keyboard, a screen reader or a zoomed-in screen, so every member gets the full experience. Making that happen starts with knowing what accessibility looks like at each loyalty touchpoint.
What is an accessible loyalty program?
An accessible loyalty program is one every customer can join, understand and use, including shoppers who rely on assistive technology. In practice, it means each loyalty touchpoint meets the same standard as the rest of your store, which today is WCAG 2.2 AA:
None of this is a separate project from your loyalty strategy. It decides whether the strategy reaches everyone it was built for.
Why does accessibility drive customer loyalty?
The CDC reports that more than 1 in 4 U.S. adults, over 70 million people, has a disability. Add older shoppers with declining vision and anyone browsing one-handed on a phone, and accessible design affects a large share of any brand's customer base.
These shoppers reward stores that work for them. In the UK's Click-Away Pound survey, 69% of disabled online shoppers said they leave sites that are hard to use. But 83% limit their shopping to sites they already know are accessible, and 86% have paid more for a product on an accessible site rather than buy it cheaper on one that's harder to use.
Once these customers find a store that works, they stick with it and spend more there. An accessible loyalty program builds on that by giving them points, perks and recognition for coming back.
Accessibility increases the number of people who can become customers, and loyalty increases how much each customer is worth. If you invest in only one, you lose value on the other.
Ecommerce accessibility is now an enterprise risk
For mid-market and enterprise brands, the legal exposure is hard to ignore.
U.S. litigation is concentrated in retail.
UsableNet's 2025 year-end report tracked more than 5,000 digital accessibility lawsuits, with 70% aimed at ecommerce. Over a third of the top 500 ecommerce retailers were sued at least once, and 45% of federal cases targeted companies that had already been sued before.
Overlay widgets don't solve it.
UsableNet counted more than 1,400 lawsuits in 2025 against companies that had an accessibility widget installed. In January 2025, the FTC ordered accessiBe to pay $1 million over claims that its AI plug-in could make any website WCAG compliant.
Selling into Europe adds new obligations.
The European Accessibility Act took effect on June 28, 2025. It applies to ecommerce services offered to EU consumers, whether or not the business is based in the EU.
Your storefront includes every app embedded in it. A rewards panel a screen reader can't operate is part of the same experience a demand letter will cite.
Where loyalty experiences commonly break
Loyalty touchpoints tend to sit on top of the theme, added by apps and customized by different teams over time. That makes them easy to leave out of an audit. Common issues include:
How Smile and TestParty work together
TestParty
TestParty fixes the storefront at the source. TestParty audits Shopify stores against WCAG 2.2 AA and fixes issues directly in the theme code, submitting changes for your team to review rather than layering a widget on top. Brands such as Dime Beauty have moved from overlay widgets to code-level remediation without assigning their own developers, and receive a monthly audit report.
Smile
Smile turns access into repeat purchases. Smile gives brands points, referrals and VIP tiers without engineering work. Shoppers who use Smile rewards have a 56% higher repeat purchase rate than those who don't. Loyalty data syncs to tools like Klaviyo, so lifecycle teams can segment by points balance and tier.
The two don't need to integrate. TestParty widens who can buy from you. Smile increases how often they come back. Together they cover the full customer journey on the same storefront.
Build a loyalty program every customer can use
If you lead loyalty, retention or ecommerce at a consumer brand and want a program that holds up for every customer, talk to our team at Smile. We'll walk through how your program performs today, where the customer experience can improve, and how to work with partners like TestParty to keep your storefront accessible as you scale.
