NeoGrow: free WooCommerce loyalty points and photo reviews plugin

NeoGrow is a free, GPL-licensed WooCommerce points and rewards plugin that also owns the review system, so photo reviews and loyalty points run in one install rather than two. Customers earn points for orders and for leaving a review with a photo, and spend them in the basket and at checkout. It is self-hosted — the reviews and the balances sit in your own database on your own hosting, the points in their own table rather than in wp_postmeta, with no account to open and no external service to call. It is built for High-Performance Order Storage and the cart and checkout blocks, and it always calculates points against your store's base currency, so a multi-currency store awards the same points for the same basket.

For most shoppers, yes. Northwestern's Spiegel Research Center found a product with five reviews is 270% more likely to be bought than the same product with none, and that the lift is larger on expensive products (380%) than on cheap ones (190%). PowerReviews puts the share of shoppers who read reviews at 99.9%. Price still matters, of course. The point is that a review is the cheaper lever: a discount costs you margin on every single order forever, while a review is written once and keeps working.

It is a real cost, and it is the right question to ask. Three things make it work out. You set the earn rate yourself, so you decide what a point is worth before a single one is issued. Points are calculated on the goods total, so you are never paying out on tax or postage. And a point only becomes a discount when the customer comes back to spend it, which means the cost only lands on an order you would not otherwise have had. McKinsey's loyalty research makes the same point from the other direction: programs worry about people redeeming, but members who redeem spend 25% more than members who never do, and the redemption is what triggers the extra spending rather than eroding it.

Less than you would think, and a page with no bad reviews at all hurts more. Spiegel found purchase likelihood peaks around 4.0 to 4.7 stars and then falls as a rating approaches a perfect 5.0, and PowerReviews found 96% of shoppers go looking for the critical reviews deliberately. A spotless page reads as edited, not as excellent. The most valuable thing on your reviews tab is often a fair complaint with a polite, helpful reply underneath it from you, because that is the thing a competitor cannot fake. NeoGrow rewards a customer for writing a review, never for the rating they give, so you are never in the position of having paid for five stars.

A small shop is where it matters most, because a big shop already has reviews and you do not. The threshold is lower than people expect: Spiegel found most of the conversion benefit arrives with the first five reviews on a product, so the gap you need to close is five, not five hundred. It also costs nothing to find out. The plugin is free, there is no account or card involved, and if it turns out not to suit you the reviews and balances stay in your own database either way. Do bear in mind it is not retroactive, so the sooner it is switched on the sooner orders start counting.

The free plugin is a complete WooCommerce loyalty points and photo review system on its own: points for purchases, points for approved photo reviews, redemption at checkout, and review requests — both the automatic one sent a set number of days after an order completes and a Send now button for asking a single customer by hand. Both say what a review is worth and credit the points on approval. NeoGrow Pro is a separate add-on that layers on multi-photo and video reviews, follow-up reminders with targeting and your own template, one-click invitations to your entire backlog of unreviewed orders, automatic point adjustment on refunds and a configurable expiry window. The comparison above shows exactly where the line falls, and the roadmap beside it lists what is coming to each edition.

Yes. The redemption panel appears automatically in both the block-based Cart and Checkout and the classic shortcode versions, with no setup needed. Points are applied through the WooCommerce Store API, so order totals update live without a page reload. The [neogrow_cart_redemption] shortcode is still there if you would rather place the form somewhere else, such as a custom landing page.

Yes, with the free version and with Elementor Pro. On product pages built with Elementor Pro's Theme Builder, the points message appears above the add-to-cart button by itself, and reviews, redemption, the thank-you notice and the My Account balance work through Elementor Pro's own widgets. The free plugin also adds four widgets in a NeoGrow panel: Product Points, Product Reviews, Points Balance and Points Redemption. They work with Elementor's free version and never cache one customer's balance for another. On other builders, the same things are available as shortcodes.

Points live in a custom database table rather than in wp_options or postmeta, so point calculations never compete with your order queries — which is what keeps checkout responsive on stores with thousands of active customers. Admin dashboard statistics are cached for one hour to keep wp-admin fast; your live points data is always current, only the analytics view lags behind.

No. NeoGrow is not retroactive. It starts tracking from the moment you activate it, and it does not scan your database history to backfill points for past orders or count pre-existing reviews in the Growth Dashboard. If you want to recognize long-standing customers, Users > Edit User lets you set a starting balance by hand, with the reason recorded in the Points Log.

Only after you approve the review, from Products > Reviews in your WordPress dashboard. A review that never gets published therefore never costs you points. Uploads accept JPG, PNG and WebP, up to 5 MB, and are offered to logged-in customers only.

In the free version points expire six months after they were earned, on a first-in, first-out basis, so the oldest points in a balance are always spent first. Setting your own expiry window, or turning expiry off entirely, is part of NeoGrow Pro.

The free version does not readjust the balance automatically. Go to Users > Edit User to correct it by hand, and the change is written to the Points Log with your reason attached. Automatic adjustment on refund and cancellation is a NeoGrow Pro feature. Points are calculated on the order subtotal in the first place, so tax and shipping never inflate what you would be giving back — and Pro measures the refund against that same subtotal, so refunding only the postage takes back nothing at all.

Yes. Points are always calculated against your store's base currency, using the exchange rate recorded on the order, so the same basket earns the same points whatever currency the customer paid in. Redemption converts the other way, so the discount is quoted and applied in the currency the shopper is browsing in. WooPayments, CURCY and FOX are all supported natively with nothing to configure; other currency switchers can be connected with two documented filters. If you sell in one currency, none of this changes anything.