The story
A family shop. Four decades. A collector institution.
Burbank Sportscards is a family business that has been a Burbank, California institution for nearly 40 years. The shop sells premium sports cards, trading card games, entertainment cards, and sealed boxes to a passionate customer base of longtime locals, fellow card shops, hobbyists, and active buyers and sellers in the collectibles space.
The challenge
Loyalty was there. The infrastructure wasn’t.
Burbank Sportscards already had loyal customers: longtime locals, fellow card shops, hobbyists, and dedicated collectors who treat the store as part of their week. Hardcore collectors line up online every morning for the 10am singles drop, and higher-profile buyers regularly place four-figure orders, with some reaching six figures.
What the team didn’t have was a way to formally recognize that loyalty. Burbank’s give-back philosophy lived in conversations at the till and in quiet deals extended to longtime collectors. The team needed a structured rewards program to scale that generosity across every customer, every visit, online and in store.
A formal loyalty program was the way to reward the existing base, welcome new customers into the community, and turn 40 years of trust into a system that could grow with the brand.
People are very hungry for their rewards because of how generous the program is. Some of our higher-spend customers will bank their points and do one large redemption. The gist is: people are very engaged with the rewards.
The solution
Four tiers, one app, every touchpoint covered.
Burbank chose Smile to power their rewards program. Smile gave the team a generous, flexible foundation they could run on their own, with the API and SDK depth to build a fully custom experience on top.
A four-tier VIP structure (Rookie, All Star, Hall of Fame, G.O.A.T) ladders up to a 5% store-wide discount for the deepest collectors. Burbank’s existing Shop integration plugs straight into Smile, so when a customer pays at the till, an account is created, and they’re enrolled in loyalty automatically. That single hand-off is a big reason membership now sits at 62%, above the Smile benchmark.
Using the Smile API and SDK, the team built a custom mobile app, Burbank Cards, to make rewards easy to use in-store and on the go. The app surfaces each customer’s profile, available points, the rewards they can redeem, and any unused rewards. Coupons render as a barcode that staff scan at the till, or a code customers can paste into mobile checkout, and a tier progress bar built on Smile’s API shows exactly how close they are to the next VIP level.
Burbank uses Smile’s checkout extensions to embed loyalty directly inside their Shopify checkout. Members can select and apply a points-based discount in one click, and non-members see exactly how many points they’d earn if they signed up before the purchase clears.
What Smile enabled for Burbank:
- A generous four-tier VIP program, capped by a 5% store-wide discount for the most loyal collectors
- Automatic enrollment through the Shop integration, lifting membership to 62% of the customer base
- A custom Burbank Cards mobile app, built directly on the Smile API and SDK
- Frictionless redemption across every touchpoint: in-store at the till, at checkout, and inside the app
The program
Four-tier VIP program
01
Rookie
02
All Star
03
Hall of Fame
04
G.O.A.T
The ladder tops out at a 5% store-wide discount for the deepest collectors.
The results
Rewards collectors actually use.
Burbank’s program runs a 70% redemption rate (3x Smile’s top-performing threshold), 93% reward usage, a 67% order earning rate, and a 62% membership rate that pulls the majority of shoppers into the program.
Beyond the numbers, the core base has shifted from the website to the Burbank Cards app as their daily way to shop, and inside Smile, Burbank has become the example the team reaches for when a new sports card merchant asks what a great loyalty program looks like.
