Customers have been hankering for relevant deals while shopping – and a growing number of banks, including community banks, are satiating that craving by debuting merchant-funded rewards to their cardholders.

One of the latest institutions to hop aboard the shopping discount bandwagon? Richmond, Calif.-based Mechanics Bank, a $3 billion independent bank.

For roughly a month now, Mechanics Bank has offered its MasterCard debit customers merchant-funded rewards based on their shopping patterns in a program it’s calling Purchase Rewards.The new program works like this: Cardholders can view available offers on their online banking homepages as well as by viewing their rewards summary pages. If an offer appeals to them, they click to activate it and the reward is loaded onto their debit cards.

“We have been having pretty good click-through rates,” Bradley Leimer, vice president of online and mobile strategy, tells Bank Innovation. “We will track debit card usage and what we are gaining from [the program] and look at what that does to activity when [customers] log in to do online banking.”

Purchase Rewards, which is administered through Mechanics’ Intuit online banking solution, is possible because of a deal inked with Cardlytics, a rewards vendor. Cardlytics also recently signed with Bank of America, a bank that has been testing out a Groupon-like service under the name of BankAmeriDeals.

Though Mechanics’ s rewards program is pretty fresh, the bank is already seeing the need to better school its customers on how it works.

“We are seeing the need to educate,” Leimer tells Bank Innovation.“It’s not as easy as it seems.”

Beyond the need to educate customers, Leimer says he would like to glean a better understanding of how the deals perform at participating merchants and discover whether consumers are associating the offers as rewards since they don’t receive the reward into their accounts until six or eight weeks after purchasing something, says Leimer.

“Are people seeing the benefit?” he asks.