Guide
Moving a loyalty card from cardboard to the phone
What changes, what it costs, how long it takes, and when it is not worth doing.
A cardboard card works. It costs almost nothing, everybody knows how to use one, and a rubber stamp never breaks down. If you are reading this page, something is grating anyway: the card stays at home, the customer swears they had eight, or you have no idea how many people actually come back. Here is what really changes when the card moves onto the phone.
What the cardboard card costs you
The cardboard itself is cheap. What costs is everything around it. A customer who forgets their card leaves without a stamp, so that day's loyalty effort produces nothing. A card lost on the ninth visit gets rebuilt from memory, which means on trust, and sometimes twice. You have no way of knowing how many cards are out there, how many reach the end, or whether the ones that reach the end bring anybody back. And the day you want to tell your regulars that your hours are changing, you have not got a single one of their contacts.
The four ways to put a loyalty card on a phone
They do not ask the same effort of you and they do not leave you holding the same thing. Here they are, heaviest first.
A module in your till
Your point-of-sale software offers loyalty as an add-on. This is what fits your bookkeeping best, since everything sits in one place. It is also what ties you down hardest: changing till means losing the programme, and the add-on is often billed monthly on top of the till itself. Somebody has to set it up once.
An app of your own
An application under your name, on both app stores. It is the finest shop window and by far the most expensive: it has to be built, kept working through every version of iOS and Android, and above all every customer has to be talked into installing an app for a single shop. People will happily install an app for a chain, rarely for one bakery.
A pass in the phone's wallet
The wallet built into iOS and Android can hold a loyalty pass. The customer installs nothing extra, which is its great advantage. On the other hand your card is a flat object there: the counter updates, but there is nowhere to say what you are offering, and nowhere for a customer to find you. Setting it up needs certificates from Apple and from Google, which is not a shopkeeper's job.
One app shared between shops
A single application carrying the cards of several shops, yours among them. The customer installs it once and finds everything in one place, which is what makes installing it defensible. You have no software to commission and no certificate to request. The trade-off is real: your card sits alongside others, and you depend on somebody else keeping the app alive. This is what Fideloop does.
What changes for your customers
The first visit is the only awkward moment: something usually has to be installed (or, with some tools, an account created in the browser), and some people will not do that at the counter with three others waiting behind them. That is why the poster in the window matters as much as the counter: it can be scanned while waiting, or on the way out. After that the gesture is shorter than with cardboard: the customer shows their code, you scan it, and there is nothing to dig out of a wallet. And the customer can see where they stand without asking you, which removes the most frequent conversation of the day.
What you lose, and nobody will tell you
You lose some of the customers who will not install anything. They exist, they are often the ones who have been loyal longest, and no app will win them over. Some tools, Fideloop among them, leave them a fallback in the phone's browser, provided they create an account, but those who want neither an app nor an account remain lost. If your customers are elderly or passing through, that number is not marginal. The honest answer is not to ignore them: keep the cardboard for them a while, and after two months look at which of the two is actually turning. You also lose the stamp, which some people liked, and the card you show a friend. Small things, but they are things.
How long it really takes
Opening a shop and settling what the card offers: a quarter of an hour, once. Printing the poster and putting it up: ten minutes. Installing Fideloop Pro on the counter's phone or tablet: five minutes. The month that follows asks more of you than the setup does, because you have to remember to offer the card to customers who do not know it yet, and that is the only real work of the switch. Reckon on half a day in total, spread over four weeks.
When it is not worth doing
If your customers come back by chance rather than by habit, a loyalty card will change nothing, on cardboard or on a phone: a station kiosk or a shop in a tourist street has no loop to keep turning. If you sell a few very expensive things, the reward is years away and nobody follows it. And if your programme has unusual rules, by tier or by amount spent rather than by visit, check that the tool can express them before committing: many of them, Fideloop included, count visits.
Where to start tomorrow morning
Decide first what the card offers and after how many visits, because that is the one decision that is hard to change later. Pick a number you can hold to for twelve months. Then put the poster up before you scan your first customer: the poster signs people up, and a signed-up customer comes back for a first stamp. Finally, say it out loud for two weeks, at every visit. A poster nobody mentions does not get scanned.
What people ask us about switching
- Can we keep the cardboard cards running at the same time?
- Yes, and that is usually what happens for the first few months. Nothing obliges you to withdraw the cardboard the day you scan your first customer. The simplest way is to keep stamping the cards already started and stop handing out new ones: the two systems then go out on their own, one after the other.
- Are the stamps already collected lost?
- There is no automatic transfer and nobody could build one: a stamp on cardboard is not written down anywhere. What most shopkeepers do is open the digital card at the number of stamps the customer shows them. That is trust, but it is exactly the trust you were already extending to a piece of cardboard.
- What about a customer with no smartphone?
- Nothing replaces cardboard for them, and that is better faced than worked around. Keep a few paper cards under the till for those customers. There are fewer of them than people think and they are more loyal than average: losing them would cost more than printing ten cards.
- What does the shopkeeper see about their customers?
- It depends on the tool, and it is a question worth asking before choosing. With Fideloop a shopkeeper sees how many cards are running and how far along they are, never a customer's identity nor what they buy elsewhere. The data is hosted in the European Union and a customer can ask for theirs to be erased.
Your first stamp can land tonight
The free plan holds up to 100 customers, with no card details at sign-up. If the switch does not convince you, you will have paid nothing to find out.