Understanding the Gold / Silver / Bronze tier system

Every customer in Restock Notify gets a Gold, Silver, or Bronze tier badge based on their behavior in your shop. Here is exactly how the score is computed and what each tier means in practice.

The three factors

We score on the classic RFM model — Recency, Frequency, Monetary — adapted for independent retail.

• Recency — days since their last purchase. Recent buyers score higher than long-gone buyers.
• Frequency — orders in the last 12 months. A customer who came in monthly outranks one who came in once.
• Monetary — lifetime spend. Dollar value of all their orders since they first bought.

Each factor is normalized against your customer base (not against a global benchmark) so the tiers are always meaningful relative to your shop, not against someone else's.

Tier thresholds

• Gold — top ~20% of customers by combined RFM score. Your highest-value, most engaged buyers. Every winback email you write should start here.
• Silver — next ~30%. Solid repeat customers. Often the source of seasonal regulars.
• Bronze — everyone else. One-and-done buyers, drifting customers, and your newest sign-ups before they've had a chance to build history.

The tier badge updates automatically every night based on the prior day's data — so a customer who buys today might move from Silver to Gold by tomorrow's dashboard.

How tiers gate other features

• The lapsed-customer worklist only surfaces Gold and Silver by default. Bronze customers are excluded because reactivating them rarely pays back the time. Override per-segment if you want.
• Restock alert ranking favors Gold and Silver — when alert capacity is the bottleneck, your best customers see it first.
• Birthday and loyalty automations only fire on Gold and Silver to keep volume sane.

When to manually override a tier

Almost never. The system updates nightly and tier moves are usually accurate. The one case worth overriding: a brand-new customer who you know is a wholesale buyer or a known VIP — bump them to Gold manually from their detail page and they're protected from the nightly recompute.

Tier overrides persist through future nightly runs. If you ever want to revert to the auto-computed tier, click "Reset to auto-tier" on the customer detail page.