Getting started
For a merchant setting Cascade up for the first time. It takes you from an empty account to reviews being collected and a loyalty program running, and links out at each step rather than covering everything at once.
1. Add your store
Sign up, then tell Cascade the name of your store and its web address. That creates two things at once: a site, which is the storefront everything hangs off, and an organization named after it, which is your account. The organization owns your store data, your team, and every program you set up, and nothing is shared between organizations. You can rename it, and add more sites, under Settings.
There is no password to choose. Enter your email address and Cascade sends you a sign-in link that works once and expires in a few minutes. You can also continue with Google, Microsoft or GitHub if your team already signs in that way, and set a password later under Settings → Security if you would rather use one. The sign-in screen is also where you will find the terms of service and the privacy policy. See Signing in for what happens on each step and how to get back in when something goes wrong.
Set your time zone early, under Settings → General. It decides when a birthday counts, which day an order falls on in your reports, and when the overnight loyalty jobs run. Changing it later moves all of that.
2. The guided setup
Cascade has three products in it: reviews, loyalty and wishlists. Most stores do not run all three, and none of them is any use until it has been set up, so the sidebar starts collapsed: each area is one link, Set up reviews, Set up loyalty, Set up wishlists or Set up your store, until you have dealt with it. The first time you sign in Cascade opens on the reviews setup, because a brand new store has nothing in its queue yet.
Each of those is a handful of questions, and every answer is a button. There are no numbers to choose and no switches to weigh up: Cascade picks a sensible value for each one and tells you what it picked, so Earn points says it will give a point per dollar spent and the review reminder says it will follow five days later. Every one of those values is editable afterward, and the buttons say so.
Answering writes the records your answers imply: the review request email and the flow that sends it, the loyalty program and its rules, or your wishlist settings. Choosing something always creates a working example rather than only switching a section on, so ticking Claim offers leaves you with a real offer to edit and ticking Collect stamps leaves you with a real stamp card. Everything it writes is an ordinary record, editable or deletable on its own screen, so nothing about the guided path is a one-way door.
Each of the three product areas ends in the same place: getting the storefront widgets onto your site. On Shopify that is a link into your theme editor, since the widgets ship inside the Cascade app. Everywhere else it is a script tag with your own publishable key already filled in. You do not have to create that key: every account gets one when it is created.
Nothing here traps you. Each page has Skip for now, which settles the area without setting it up: a store that deliberately does not run loyalty is finished, not half configured. And Show everything at the foot of the sidebar opens the full navigation whenever you just want to look around. An area you have set up or skipped never asks again.
The setup pages live at /reviews/setup, /loyalty-programs/setup, /wishlists/setup and /site/setup, so you can come back to one you skipped. Coming back to one you already finished will not write a second copy of anything: the reviews page says review requests are already on and sends you to the flow, and the loyalty page offers to publish the program you have (or to open it, if it is already live).
3. Connect your store
Cascade does not sell anything itself. It needs your products, customers and orders so that a review request knows who to email and a loyalty rule knows what was spent. The setup pages will say so if your catalog has not arrived yet, and let you carry on anyway.
Set up your store under Site is the short version of this section: it asks whether your store runs on Shopify or somewhere else and gives you the instructions for that answer. It settles itself once a catalog arrives, however it arrives, so a store that imported a CSV or connected Shopify never sees it.
On Shopify, install the Cascade app from your Shopify admin. You will be asked which Cascade organization to connect the store to, then Shopify asks you to approve the permissions. When you land back in Cascade the store is connected: a site has been created, webhooks are registered so future changes arrive on their own, and a backfill of your existing catalog and order history is already running. See Connecting Shopify.
On anything else, you push your records to Cascade over the API and register a webhook to hear about what happens back. This is a day of work for a developer, and there is a complete worked example to copy from. See Custom integration.
With no store to connect yet, upload CSVs instead. See Importing products and Importing orders. You can switch to a live connection later without losing what you imported.
Either way, watch the first sync land under Settings → Imports. Rows that could not be read are listed there with the reason.
4. Put the widgets on your storefront
Everything a shopper sees comes from one script tag: star ratings, the review list, the review form, the loyalty page and the wishlist manager. Add the script once, then drop in the pieces you want where you want them. The guided setup gives you the snippet for the area you just set up; Storefront widgets is the full list.
You will need a publishable key, which your account already has, and for anything tied to a signed-in shopper, a signature generated on your server.
On Shopify there is less to do: the Cascade app lists the widgets your theme has and adds the missing ones for you, and it handles the signature for you as well. See Widgets in your theme.
5. Beyond the guided setup
The setup pages give you a working starting point, not a finished configuration. When you are ready to go further:
- Reviews. Add a condition so a flow only covers some orders, tune screening, and decide who hears about arriving reviews. See Collecting reviews. If you are moving from another reviews app, import your history first so your products do not start from zero stars. See Importing reviews.
- Loyalty. Add tiers, stamp cards and offers, and change the rules the setup page wrote. See Loyalty, and Migrating from another loyalty app if members already have balances you need to honor.
- Wishlists. Turn on the price-drop and back-in-stock alerts, which start off. See Wishlists.