Contractor rewards program: reward what saves your yard money

The big contractor rewards programs pay for spend on a brand or at a chain. None of the five pays for how an order was placed or how fast the invoice was paid.

Benjamin Moore's Contractor Rewards is free and earns points on premium paints and stains, redeemable from a catalog of electronics, trips, apparel, sprayers and ladders. Receipts must be submitted within 60 days of purchase, and BI Worldwide, a loyalty company, administers it. CertainTeed's Contractor Cash Back pays a cash rebate onto a prepaid Visa card for eligible roofing and siding, with invoices due within 90 days and about four weeks of processing for online claims.

The two big boxes reward every dollar. The Home Depot added three tiers to Pro Xtra on January 5, 2023: Member, Elite and VIP, and "every dollar spent counts toward earning rewards." Lowe's replaced its old program in February 2025 with MyLowe's Pro Rewards: Gold Pro, Platinum Pro and Titanium Pro, points on every dollar, redeemable for experiences, products or MyLowe's Money. Sherwin-Williams PRO+ went the other way: "No Points. No Minimums." Its benefit is PRO+ pricing and a 0% interest credit option subject to approval.

That makes sense for a manufacturer, which never touches the order. It makes less sense for a yard, which pays the cost of every order that arrives by phone.

A dealer program should not pay for volume alone because volume rewards go mostly to accounts that were buying from you anyway. The Home Depot says Pros are about 10 percent of its customers and about half of its sales. A points rate on every dollar hands the biggest check to your biggest framer, who was not leaving.

What a yard can change is how the order arrives and when it gets paid. Both cost real money, and so does the card fee. A phone order ties up a counter person for the length of the call and the keying. A net-30 invoice means you collect weeks after the lumber left. A card payment loses interchange on every sale. ToolSwift's Rewards page names the same costs, and the program design follows from them.

Contractors do respond to rewards. In a 2025 ITA Group study, 49% of contractors said they buy more often from companies with a loyalty program once enrolled, 57% said rewards directly affect which distributor or manufacturer they pick, and 83% of contractors not in a program said they would join one. ITA Group sells loyalty programs and the published summary gives no sample size, so treat those as direction, not measurement.

The direction is enough for one conclusion. If contractors will change behavior for points, choose the behavior.

The first rule is that you decide which orders earn. You can pay points on app and portal orders as the incentive, on counter, phone and in-store orders, or on all of them at different rates.

My advice is both, with a gap. Nearly 90% of contractors in the Reward Paths 2022 survey said they want rewards on all purchases, regardless of channel. A program that pays nothing at the counter tells your most loyal walk-in regular that his loyalty does not count. So pay a base rate everywhere you want loyalty, and put the extra points on the orders a contractor places himself.

That gap is where the money is. A self-serve order moves the keying from your staff to the customer. A contractor can still order in the app and pick up at the yard, so the extra points do not push anyone onto a delivery he does not want.

In ToolSwift Rewards this is a setting the dealer controls: the program is set up inside ToolSwift, and the dealer picks which channels earn and at what rate.

The step that goes wrong the first time: staff keep taking phone orders from contractors who have an app account, out of habit and good service. Tell your counter, before launch, that "you can place that in the app and get extra points for it" is the new answer to a routine reorder.

The second rule is that points scale with how fast the invoice is paid: full points for paying at checkout, fewer as the invoice ages. In ToolSwift Rewards the dealer sets every threshold.

Every order already carries how it was paid, its payment status and the invoice due date, as the order screen above shows. Those are the facts a payment rule pays on. A contractor who pays at checkout gets the full earn. A contractor who pays on day 29 of net 30 gets less, and one who pays late gets the least.

Payment method is the second lever. ToolSwift lets a dealer set points to earn only on ACH, cash or account payment, with no points on cards if the dealer chooses. That passes the interchange you save back to the customer as points, so the cheaper way to pay becomes the one the contractor prefers.

Promotions sit on top of the base rate. A dealer can add extra points on a specific item, category, collection or brand, each with start and end dates, and attach conditions such as payment method, stocked or special order, order value, delivery or pickup, and customer segment. Caps apply per order, per customer and per campaign, so one big special order cannot drain the budget.

I will not quote a rate here, because the right rate depends on your margins, your terms and what a phone order costs your counter. Start small. You can raise a rate in a week; cutting one costs you trust.