The story
Performance gear built for athletes. Loyalty infrastructure that needed rebuilding.
ROKA designs performance eyewear and apparel built for athletes and built to be worn anywhere. Their direct-to-consumer business runs on a headless Shopify storefront, with development outsourced to a specialized partner. That setup gives ROKA a custom, fast, on-brand experience, but it also means every tool in their stack has to play well with a non-native Shopify front-end.
The challenge
Why ROKA left Yotpo after five years
ROKA had been running their loyalty program on Yotpo for more than five years. By the ROKA team’s account, pricing climbed steeply at each renewal, support for headless stores stayed thin, and in six or seven months the team was reassigned across four different account managers.
Switching to Smile brought roughly 50% lower loyalty spend than on Yotpo, per ROKA, on a platform built natively for Shopify.
Our customer experience team is so thankful to have everything in Shopify, connected directly to our systems, without having to open up an alternate browser in Yotpo.
The solution
Loyalty consolidated inside Shopify. Roughly half the loyalty spend.
ROKA chose Smile to consolidate loyalty back inside Shopify. The migration is still in progress: the core program is live, and the team is working through the nuances that come with a headless build, including referrals and the loyalty hub experience. Because ROKA uses little to no native Shopify front-end, every surface has to be wired up deliberately. The team has already developed workarounds for the loyalty hub, and continues to partner with Smile on patterns that fit a headless storefront, particularly around promoting referrals without relying on the standard pop-up.
Smile’s native Shopify integration means loyalty data lives where the rest of ROKA’s commerce data lives. For a headless store with outsourced development, that consolidation matters: fewer integrations to maintain, fewer browser tabs for support agents, and a single source of truth for customer activity.
What changed after the migration:
- Loyalty consolidated inside Shopify, with no separate browser tab for the customer experience team
- Customer history and loyalty activity connected directly to the systems CX agents already use
- Workarounds in place for a headless loyalty hub experience, with referrals in active development
The stack
Headless Shopify
The results
Members redeem and spend more. One tab, not two.
ROKA hasn’t yet run a head-to-head comparison on loyalty metrics, the migration is still maturing, but the operational results are already visible. The customer experience team no longer toggles between Shopify and a separate loyalty browser tab to resolve tickets. Loyalty activity is connected to the same systems they use for every other customer interaction. And the team is back to focusing on the program itself rather than managing vendor churn.
The biggest win is the unified workflow for the people closest to ROKA’s customers. As the headless build continues, ROKA and Smile are working through referral promotion patterns that fit a fully custom storefront, an area where ROKA is helping shape what good looks like for other headless merchants.
Plan end-to-end with a headless integration and make sure that you have help at every step along the way.
Why Smile
Headless done right. A partner that stays.
Headless storefronts trade convention for control, and that trade-off only works when every tool in the stack respects the custom front-end. Smile’s native Shopify foundation, combined with a willingness to develop headless patterns alongside the merchant, is what made the switch viable for ROKA.
