Among the loyalty buyers in our corpus who describe their buying process, roughly three in five name a formal RFP or RFI; the rest run none at all, and the split tracks company size rather than the category. But the RFP is not the artefact that matters most. The document buyers describe producing at every level of process is a business case — the ones with no RFP write one too — and it is the document that carries the case for whether an evaluation should happen at all. What follows is the level of process you should expect and what sets it, the business case and requirements behind it, what buyers say decided the vendor choice, who can stop the decision, and the three dates that set your calendar.
How do you run a loyalty platform evaluation?
A loyalty platform evaluation starts by establishing the requirements and the business case, then moves through vendor assessment and, commonly, a pilot or proof of concept before signature. Buyers most often evaluate integration with the existing stack, reporting depth, cost against value, program flexibility and marketer self-service. How formal the process gets depends on what the purchase costs: larger purchases run procurement-led RFPs, smaller ones go from a business case straight to executive approval. Plan the timing around your commerce or POS roadmap, your contract expiry and your budget calendar.
How formal will your process be?
In these interviews the level of process is set by what the purchase costs rather than by the category, and in organizations with a mature technology function it is assigned before the evaluation starts. Buyers describe several different mechanisms for the same underlying rule — a more expensive, more consequential purchase gets more formal governance. One apparel retailer's technology function formalizes it outright, classing every project platinum, gold, silver or bronze and attaching the governance to the class. Others express the same logic as a fixed annual-value line, a light RFP for the middle band, an approved-vendor list that removes the competitive bid, or a business case with no bid at all. The ladder below is the shape those mechanisms describe between them, not a model any single company runs.
| Purchase shape | Typical evaluation process |
|---|---|
| Enterprise Above the capital line | Formal RFP, with procurement owning or heavily managing the process. Procurement, IT and marketing all assess the vendor, each from its own angle. At the enterprise end of the corpus, legal and information security are typically described as parallel tracks rather than final checks. Steering committee and executive oversight attach at this level and not below it. |
| Major purchase Named annual-value threshold | A competitive process, which one buyer calls a light RFP: requirements written down, a short list of three or four vendors compared on value and pricing, and procurement joining at evaluation and contracting rather than owning the process from the start. |
| Below the line Or from an approved-vendor list | No competitive bid. A director writes a business case with the financial analysis and expected ROI, a C-suite sponsor approves it, and procurement and legal review terms at the end. This is a common path in these interviews. |
| Already-compliant add-on Inside a platform you already run | Explicitly carved out. Where a capability arrives as an app inside a commerce platform that has already cleared review, buyers describe the process as materially less extensive — sometimes nonexistent beyond the owner's judgment. |
Where buyers describe a threshold, it is a specific figure rather than a rule of thumb, and the people running the process know what it is. The implication — ours, not a buyer's — is to establish yours before the evaluation begins, so the process is designed for the approvals it will eventually need rather than retrofitted to them.
One thing the levels do not change. Formality scales with the cheque; the business case does not. Every path down that ladder, including the one with no competitive bid at all, still runs through somebody writing down why the money should be spent.
What should a loyalty platform business case include?
A loyalty platform business case should contain five things: an executive summary, the business impact, financial analysis and expected ROI, pricing detail, and the gap between the program today and where it needs to be. It is the document almost everyone writes. One buyer puts it plainly: they always have a business case to justify new software, even when the process is not a full RFP. Its named components are consistent enough to write down.
- An executive summary written for the approver, not the evaluator
- The business impact, stated as the outcome rather than the capability
- Financial analysis and expected ROI — named by more buyers than any other component
- Pricing detail, at the depth the CFO will ask for rather than the depth the vendor supplied
- Where the program stands today, the gap, and what closing it is worth
The requirements behind it
Requirements gathering is the named first step wherever buyers describe an ideal process. The sequence they give is requirements, then vendor assessment, then the RFP where there is one, then a fit-gap analysis against the responses.
- Requirements assembled with the stakeholders before any vendor is engaged — for loyalty that list runs wider than martech, see below
- The integrations named individually, with the POS and the commerce platform first
- Program mechanics specified as what must be reconfigurable, not as what the program does today
- Multi-brand and multi-market requirements collected per brand, where that applies, before a single list is written
Build the pilot into the proposal
Not a third document — the validation plan that travels inside the first one, and more consistent across these interviews than the RFP itself. Buyers describe starting with a pilot before full-scale implementation, pitching a proposal to the executive team with a pilot attached, or pushing for proof-of-concept trials to demonstrate incrementality before committing. They describe the pilot, but not how they scoped it, so the interviews support the need for validation more strongly than they support any standard pilot design. Our recommendation is to settle three things in the proposal rather than after the approval:
- What the pilot is primarily meant to prove: incrementality, integration, or operability
- Its duration and scope, so neither is renegotiated once the money is committed
- What happens to the pilot's data and configuration if you do not proceed
What should you evaluate in a loyalty platform?
The criteria buyers name most often are integration with the existing stack, reporting depth, and cost against value. Program flexibility and marketer self-service follow closely. For loyalty specifically, POS and commerce integrations dominate what buyers mean when they talk about integration at all.
Named by most buyers
Named often
Also named
Emerging — 2026 interviews only
Grouped by how often buyers named each criterion as deciding their evaluation. Tiers rather than a strict rank: the interviews support the grouping, not a precise ordering within it. Bars show the tier, not vendor scores or importance weights.
The two criteria that aren't criteria
The tiers above answer what gets officially evaluated. These two answer what may decide it anyway, and neither appears on a requirements list. Adjacency is the first: buyers describe a front-runner emerging because the vendor already runs their CRM and email, or their POS, and everything else looks expensive by comparison. Politics is the second, and one buyer lists it among the final decision factors without embarrassment. Neither belongs in a requirements document. Both are worth naming out loud before you write one: either can overturn a recommendation that looks stronger on the stated criteria.
What role does procurement play in a loyalty platform evaluation?
Procurement either owns the evaluation process or joins later for contracting, depending largely on the size and formality of the purchase. Which of the two you have changes who you are writing for.
Procurement owns the process
The important distinction: this is not weighted scoring. Procurement issues the RFP and runs it, and each function holds a veto rather than a weight — procurement, marketing and IT evaluate in parallel from their own perspective, and all must agree before the evaluation moves on.
IT assesses technical compatibility, marketing assesses the business requirement, procurement assesses commercial terms. At the largest scale this comes with dedicated procurement and legal teams and per-vendor analysis.
It inverts how most evaluations are built. Under a scorecard, a vendor excellent on two axes and weak on a third still finishes well; under unanimity it does not average out — it stops. Buyers running it describe surfacing each function's disqualifiers early rather than meeting them in a consolidation meeting.
Procurement joins at contracting
The process starts informally inside the business and formalizes only at evaluation and contracting, where procurement and legal review terms and negotiate. The judgment about fit was made before they arrived.
This is the more common shape below the enterprise level, and it is why a business case that is persuasive to a CFO matters more than a document that is persuasive to a procurement team.
Who approves a loyalty platform purchase?
In these interviews the approval ceiling is usually the C-suite. Buyers name the CMO, the CFO, or the executive leadership team as the final approval; in leaner organizations a director plus a CFO is the entire ladder. What is absent is as informative as what is present: no buyer in the loyalty interviews describes a board, an investment committee, or a capital-approval body sitting above the decision.
So the funding conversation and the selection conversation are usually the same conversation, with the same people in the room — which means the business case has to carry both the case for the category and the case for the vendor at once.
Who should be involved in a loyalty platform evaluation?
Marketing and IT are central, with finance, legal, fraud, regulatory, store operations and divisional loyalty leads joining where the business model requires them. This is where loyalty selection diverges most sharply in these interviews from other platform purchases, and the interviews show how wide it gets: a multi-brand group seats legal, fraud and regulatory on the loyalty committee; a franchised retailer takes input from store sales associates on the grounds that they are the ones who operate the tools in stores; and multi-brand groups convene divisional loyalty leads who each bring their own requirements.
The multi-brand shape is worth describing on its own, because it changes the requirements document. A shared technology function gathers requirements from every brand, builds a long list, cuts it to a short list, and hands it back to the brands to evaluate against their own needs. All-brand buy-in is sought for the economics rather than mandated — which means the requirements have to survive contact with brands that will not all agree, and the honest version specifies which are common and which are divisional before the vendors see them.
When should you start a loyalty platform evaluation?
Three dates decide it: a commerce or POS replatform, the incumbent platform's contract expiry, and the budget calendar. Together they make the evaluation date an output rather than an input. Three clocks — and one of the three can also stop them.
A commerce or POS replatform. The most loyalty-specific dependency in these interviews, and the one that most often decides when the evaluation can start rather than whether it should. Buyers describe loyalty sequenced explicitly behind a commerce migration, with integration into the new platform and POS as the framing question of the whole evaluation. For why the replatform puts loyalty in play at all, see why brands switch loyalty platforms.
A contract expiry. Buyers prepare an evaluation roughly a year ahead of a known end date, which means the work starts long before anyone feels urgency about the product.
The budget calendar. Several buyers describe needing the decision made before an autumn cutoff to land in the following year's budget; others align the whole cycle to the calendar year. A decision that misses the cutoff does not slip by weeks, it slips by a budget year.
And the one that stops the clock: the same replatform. Buyers mid-migration describe pausing vendor selection wholesale — no RFPs in market, tooling decisions deferred until the transformation completes, and a loyalty program that will have to be rebuilt as part of it anyway. If you are about to start an evaluation inside a live commerce transformation, that pause recurs in these interviews, and planning for it beats discovering it.
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Get my read →When there is no formal RFP
The absence of a formal process is rarely the absence of a process. What buyers describe instead:
The business case straight to the C-suite
The default substitute: research, an ROI model, leadership approval.
The incumbent next door
The most commonly described shortcut. A CRM, email or POS vendor already installed becomes the front-runner on adjacency alone, and buyers name seamless communication between systems as the reason.
A proof-of-concept in place of paperwork
The trial is asked to demonstrate incrementality rather than capability.
Peer references and manual research
For smaller projects, buyers research manually and consult peers rather than issuing anything.
Conferences as the discovery layer
The trade show does the work an RFI would otherwise do. At least one buyer attends specifically to be visible to vendors rather than to scout them.
An internal ticket into a roadmap queue
A global technology team decides fit and priority rather than a committee.
Building it yourself
Two buyers describe this as their organization's default, and one names it as the reason better third-party tools get adopted late.
One shape is specific to this category and worth separating from the rest: some buyers engage an agency to redesign the program before any platform evaluation starts. The design engagement comes first, the platform selection second. Only a handful of buyers describe it, so treat it as a pattern worth testing rather than an established one — the argument is made in full on what loyalty buyers wish they had known.
What this page cannot tell you
Two limits worth stating rather than papering over. No buyer in these interviews describes a written scoring instrument — no rubric, no weighting, no scorecard. What they give is the criteria that mattered, in prose, which is why the grouping above is a frequency tier and not a model you can lift. If you want a weighted matrix, build one; do not assume the category runs on one. And every timing figure buyers gave was a plan rather than a retrospective — nobody reports how long their completed loyalty selection actually took. Treat any published duration, this page included, as weaker evidence than your own organization's history with its last comparable purchase.
Common questions
Do you need an RFP to buy a loyalty platform?
Not necessarily. Whether you need a formal RFP depends primarily on the size of the purchase and your organization's approval rules, not on loyalty as a category. Enterprise purchases tend to run procurement-led RFPs; below internal approval thresholds, buyers may move from a business case directly to C-suite approval, with procurement and legal reviewing terms at the end.
What should you evaluate in a loyalty platform?
Integration with the existing stack, reporting depth and cost against value are the criteria buyers name most often, followed by program flexibility and marketer self-service. Multi-brand support, account-team quality, vertical fit and migration burden appear less frequently. For loyalty specifically, POS and commerce integrations dominate what buyers mean by integration.
What should a loyalty platform business case include?
Five things: an executive summary written for the approver rather than the evaluator, the business impact stated as an outcome rather than a capability, financial analysis and expected ROI, pricing detail at the depth the CFO will ask for, and the gap between the program today and where it needs to be.
Who should be involved in a loyalty platform evaluation?
Marketing and IT are central, with finance, legal, fraud, regulatory, store operations and divisional loyalty leads joining where the business model requires them. The list runs wider than it does for most platform purchases.
Who approves a loyalty platform purchase?
In these interviews the approval ceiling is usually the C-suite — most often the CMO, the CFO, or the executive leadership team. No buyer describes a board or an investment committee above the decision, so the funding conversation is usually the same conversation as the selection.
When should you start a loyalty platform evaluation?
Work backwards from three dates: a commerce or POS replatform, the incumbent platform's contract expiry, and the budget calendar. A decision that misses the budget cutoff slips by a year rather than by weeks, and a live commerce migration can pause the evaluation entirely.
Related reading
This page is the process and the paperwork. The evaluation checks themselves live elsewhere and are not repeated here: the loyalty rebuild closes with three checks to run before you write the requirements doc, and what loyalty buyers wish they had known with five more, starting with designing the program before you look at a platform. For the money, what buyers actually pay for loyalty; for what puts a program in play in the first place, why brands switch loyalty platforms. The nearest sibling in another category is how to write a CDP RFP, where the process is formal enough that the document itself is the deliverable, the committees are doubled, and the approval ladder runs higher.
Get this research made for your stack
How formal your process will be depends on your size, your structure and what you are replatforming around — and the requirements that matter depend on your POS, your brands and your program design. Do a 15-minute interview and get the version of this that applies to you: what buyers in your position put in the business case, who they had to get through, and what they wish they had specified.
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