Installation & user guide

BigCommerce stores a customer's store credit as a single number. When it changes, nothing records who changed it, when, or why, and there's no way to spend that credit on an order you create in the control panel. Credit Vault adds all three:

• A full audit trail. Every change to a balance is logged with the amount, the balance afterwards, a reason, an optional note, and the staff member who made it. The log can't be edited or deleted.
• Adjustments with reasons. Add or remove credit from a customer and say why (goodwill, refund, promotion, loyalty, correction).
• Credit on admin orders. Apply a customer's store credit to a phone or manual order you created in BigCommerce.

It also notices when a balance changes somewhere else — a customer spending credit at checkout, or someone editing it directly in BigCommerce — and records that too, so the history always adds up to the real balance.

Credit Vault works with BigCommerce's own store credit. Balances stay in BigCommerce, customers spend them at checkout as usual, and nothing changes on your storefront.

Before you start

• Sign in as the store owner, or as a user with permission to install apps.
• Use Chrome or Firefox for the install. Safari and Brave block a cookie that BigCommerce's own sign-in step needs, which can bounce you back to the BigCommerce login screen part way through. Once Credit Vault is installed it works in any browser.
• Store credit belongs to customer accounts, so the customers you want to give credit to need an account on your store. Guest shoppers can't hold store credit.

Install the app

1. In your BigCommerce control panel, go to Apps → Marketplace and search for Credit Vault.
2. Open the listing and click Install.
3. BigCommerce shows the permissions Credit Vault asks for (listed below). Click Confirm.
4. Credit Vault opens inside your control panel. From now on you'll find it under Apps → My Apps.

Start your free trial

The first time you open Credit Vault you'll see Start your 14-day free trial. The trial is free; after 14 days the plan is $49.95 a month. You can cancel at any time during the trial and you won't be charged.

1. Click Start free trial. You'll leave the control panel for a secure Stripe checkout page.
2. Enter your card details and complete checkout. Nothing is charged today.
3. Stripe sends you back to Credit Vault in your control panel, unlocked and ready to use. A Trial: N days left badge in the header counts down your trial.

If you close the checkout page without finishing, nothing is set up and you can start the trial again whenever you're ready.

Permissions Credit Vault asks for

Anyone on your team can use Credit Vault, and every change they make is logged under their own email address. The store owner has access automatically. To add someone else:

1. In your control panel, open Settings → Users and edit the staff member.
2. Under their app permissions, turn on Credit Vault and save.

Staff can do everything in the app except export the whole store's history at once — that's kept to the store owner (see Export to CSV). Removing someone's access doesn't touch the history; their past changes stay in the log under their name.

Open Credit Vault from Apps → My Apps. The screen has three parts:

• The header — your trial or cancellation badge, a Manage Subscription link, and our support email under Need Help?
• Activity (the tab you land on) — every store credit change across your store, newest first.
• Customers — search for a customer to see their balance and history, adjust their credit, or apply it to an order.

The Activity tab is your store-wide audit trail. Each row shows:

Filter the log

Use the controls above the table to narrow it down. They combine, so you can ask for, say, every adjustment one person made last month.

• By — one staff member.
• Type — one kind of change, for example only Order redemption or only External edit.
• From and To — a date range.

Clear filters resets them. The log shows 50 rows at a time; use Previous and Next below the table to page through.

1. Click the Customers tab.
2. Type a name or an email address into Find a customer and press Search. Names can be partial; email addresses have to be typed in full.
3. Click Manage next to the customer.

Before you search, the tab lists customers with recent credit activity, so the people you're most likely to come back to are one click away. On a brand-new install it lists recent customers from your orders instead. You can also open a customer by clicking their name in the activity log.

The customer page shows their Current store credit at the top right, followed by three panels: Adjust credit, Apply credit to an order, and History. ← Back to search returns you to the tabs.

On the customer's page, in the Adjust credit panel:

1. Under Action, choose Add credit or Remove credit.
2. Enter the Amount.
3. Pick a Reason: Goodwill / customer service, Refund to store credit, Promotion / marketing, Loyalty reward, Correction / fix an error, or Other.
4. Optionally add a Note — an order number, a ticket reference, anything that'll make sense to whoever reads the history later.
5. Check the line that reads New balance will be …, then click Apply adjustment.

The new balance is saved to BigCommerce straight away — the customer can spend it at checkout immediately, and it shows on their account in Customers → (customer) → Store credit in BigCommerce. A row is added to the history with your name on it.

Refund an order to store credit

Choose Add credit and the reason Refund to store credit. An extra Order # (optional) field appears — enter the order you're refunding and the history will link the credit to it. The entry shows as type Refund.

This adds the credit only. Process the return or refund on the order itself in BigCommerce as you normally would.

BigCommerce only lets customers spend store credit at checkout. Credit Vault lets you spend it for them on an order you create in the control panel — a phone order, say.

1. Create the order in BigCommerce

1. Go to Orders → Add, choose the customer, and add the products.
2. Finish the order with Manual payment. Don't use Save as draft — BigCommerce doesn't share draft orders with apps until they're finalized, so Credit Vault can't see them.
3. Open the new order and set its status to Awaiting Payment.

2. Apply the credit

1. In Credit Vault, open the customer and go to Apply credit to an order.
2. Choose the Order. The list shows the customer's 25 most recent orders, with each one's total, status, and any credit already applied to it.
3. The Amount fills in with the most you can apply — the lower of the customer's balance and the order total. Lower it if you only want to use part of their credit.
4. Check Record on the order as (explained below). The text underneath says exactly what will happen to the order total.
5. Click Apply to order.

The customer's balance drops by the amount applied, the redemption appears in the history as an Order redemption linked to the order, and a staff note is added to the order in BigCommerce describing the credit applied.

Payment or discount?

BigCommerce doesn't let apps fill in an order's built-in store credit field, so Credit Vault records the credit one of two ways. It preselects the sensible one, but the choice is yours:

If you record part-payment as a payment, the order still shows its full total as due — take care to collect only the remainder.

3. When the credit covers the whole order

BigCommerce doesn't change an order's status on its own, so a fully paid order still reads Awaiting Payment. Credit Vault offers a Mark order #… as awaiting fulfillment button so you can move it on in one click, or you can change the status later on the order screen.

Depending on your store's notification settings, BigCommerce may email the customer when the status changes, so Credit Vault never changes it without you clicking the button.

The History panel on a customer's page lists every change to their balance, newest first, with the same columns as the activity log. The Type column tells you where each change came from:

The history starts the first time Credit Vault sees a customer. Credit they already had before you installed the app isn't listed as a row of its own, but it's included in the Balance after figure from the first entry onwards.

A balance can change without going through Credit Vault — most often when a customer spends their credit at checkout, but also when someone edits it on the customer's page in BigCommerce, or another app changes it.

Credit Vault catches these in two ways:

• When you open the customer. Credit Vault compares its records with BigCommerce's live balance. If they differ, it records the difference as an External edit and shows a notice at the top of the page: “This balance was changed outside this app; the difference has been recorded in the history below.”
• Once a day, automatically. Credit Vault checks every customer it has already seen and records any differences it finds, so the activity log stays complete without anyone having to open each customer.

BigCommerce doesn't say who or what made an outside change, so these rows show System in the By column. You can still see when it happened, how much it was, and the balance afterwards.

• One customer: on their page, click Export CSV in the History panel. Any staff member can do this.
• The whole store: on the Activity tab, click Export CSV. The file contains exactly the rows your filters show, so set the filters first if you only want, say, last quarter. This export is limited to the store owner.

Each row has the date and time (in ISO 8601, so it sorts correctly in a spreadsheet), the customer's ID, name, and email, the currency, the change, the balance after, the type, reason, note, linked order number, and the staff member's email.

A single export holds up to 10,000 rows. If yours would be larger, Credit Vault tells you — narrow the date range and export the rest separately.

BigCommerce keeps a separate store credit balance for each currency. If your store has more than one currency enabled:

• The customer page shows the balance in your default currency, with balances in other currencies listed underneath.
• Adjust credit gains a Currency picker. Changing one currency's balance leaves the others alone.
• Credit applied to an order always comes from the balance in that order's currency.

Store credit belongs to the customer's account rather than to a storefront, so if you run several storefronts, one install covers them all.

Credit Vault is $49.95 a month after a 14-day free trial, billed through Stripe. While you're on the trial, the header shows how many days are left.

Click Manage Subscription in the header to update your card, see your invoices, or cancel. It opens Stripe's billing page and brings you back to Credit Vault when you're done.

If you cancel, you keep access until the end of the period you've paid for (or the end of your trial) and the header shows Cancels in N days. After that, Credit Vault shows the subscription page again. Your history is kept, so if you resubscribe it's all still there.

1. In your control panel, go to Apps → My Apps.
2. Find Credit Vault and click Uninstall, then confirm.

Uninstalling removes Credit Vault's access to your store. Your customers' balances in BigCommerce aren't touched. The credit history is kept, so reinstalling picks up where you left off — if you'd rather we delete it, email support@arcticleaf.io.

During install I keep getting sent back to the BigCommerce login screen.

You’re probably using Safari or Brave, which block a cookie BigCommerce’s sign-in step needs. Install from Chrome or Firefox instead. This only affects installing — once the app is installed it works in any browser.

“This session has expired.”

Sessions last a day. Reopen Credit Vault from Apps → My Apps. There’s no need to reinstall.

“This app runs inside your BigCommerce control panel.”

You opened the app’s web address directly. Credit Vault only works from inside your control panel — open it from Apps → My Apps.

The order I want isn’t in the list.

Check that it was created for this customer (not as a guest), that it was finished rather than saved as a draft, and that it’s among their 25 most recent orders.

Searching by email finds nothing.

Email search needs the full address. To search with part of it, use the customer’s name instead.

A balance changed and nobody on the team changed it.

Look for an External edit in the customer’s history. The most common cause is the customer spending credit at checkout.

“Only the store owner can export the full ledger.”

The store-wide export is limited to the store owner. Any staff member can still export one customer’s history from their page.

I see an error page instead of the app.

Credit Vault names the cause on that page. Copy the text and send it to us — it tells us exactly what went wrong.

Email support@arcticleaf.io. It helps to include your store's URL, what you were trying to do, and any error message you saw.

Credit Vault is built by Arctic Leaf. Guide last updated October 2026.