Loyalty program for restaurants, without paper punch cards

Why points, and not stamps

A stamp is a fixed unit: one visit, one stamp. It works perfectly for coffee, where everyone buys roughly the same thing at roughly the same price.

A restaurant is not like that. A stamp cannot tell an 8-EUR bill from a 60-EUR one, so your biggest spender is rewarded like a passer-by. That is precisely the customer you do not want to lose.

A points offer fixes this with a single setting. The customer builds up points in proportion to what they buy and spends them on a later visit. Spend more, build up more. In Stampino, the version based on the value of the bill is also called Cashback.

The amount built up also stays with you. A discount at the till is consumed and gone. Money on the card is a reason to come back, because it cannot be spent anywhere else.

What you give and what it costs you

You set what the customer earns: 1 point for every 10 EUR spent, and 1 point is worth 1 EUR. That is 10% back.

At 10%, a 24-EUR bill leaves the customer 2.40 EUR for the next visit.

What it costs you depends on what they spend the points on. If they go on food you cook, where ingredients are a fraction of the price, the reward costs you the ingredients, not the value on the card. If they go on bottled drinks or packaged stock, where you earn little, it costs you almost the full amount.

Hence the rule: 10% if points are spent on what you make, 5% if they can also go on bottled drinks or packaged goods.

The rest shows up in the reports after the first month.

My Thai: points in proportion to the bill

My Thai, a restaurant in Romania, gives 1 point for every 10 lei on the bill, and 1 point is worth 1 leu off the next order. The mechanic is what matters, not the currency: that is 10% back.

Why it works in a restaurant:

• It applies to the whole bill, so the customer has nothing to remember about what counts.
• One point equals one leu needs no explaining at the table.
• Points are spent on the next order rather than the current one, so there is a reason to return.

Scan the card when the bill is paid, not when the order is taken. The waiter is already at the table with the phone in hand.

Three offers on one card, and why they complement each other

Points are not the only offer at My Thai. Three run in parallel on the same card:

• Collect points: 1 point for every 10 lei, and 1 point is worth 1 leu off the next order. It applies to the whole bill.
• Dessert: every 3 visits, a dessert on the house. A stamp card, with a 56-day term.
• Shisha: buy 5, the sixth is free.

The combination works because points and stamps measure different things. Points reward how much a customer spends, stamps reward how often they come. Someone who walks in once and leaves 300 lei and someone who comes three times and leaves 80 are both valuable, and neither is captured by one offer alone.

The dessert card is the one that brings the visit. It fills in 3 visits, not 10, so the customer sees it close to done by their second meal. And a dessert costs you the ingredients, not the menu price, so a low threshold here is cheaper than it looks and reads as more generous than an equivalent discount on the bill.

The 56-day term on the dessert card is what keeps it moving: three visits in two months means someone who eats out every two or three weeks reaches the reward without rushing, while someone who comes once a quarter does not accumulate a card they would redeem next year.

Shisha is the third because it carries a good margin and has its own return rhythm: whoever orders it orders it on almost every visit, so a 5+1 card fills itself.

The part worth taking from this setup: each offer is about something else. They do not cannibalise one another, and the customer does not have to choose - all three fill in parallel, from the same bill.

How many offers you get depends on the plan. My Thai's allows four and they use three, so there is room for one more.

You can also set an expiry period

You can leave the offer with no expiry, or set a limit in days, weeks or months. The date shows on the customer's card.

When it passes, the card resets and the customer starts from zero.

The customer is notified automatically 7 days before and once more the day before, so nobody loses their stamps without warning.

In a restaurant, where visits are less frequent than in a coffee shop, a limit that is too short does more harm than good: the customer loses their points right before spending them and does not come back. Unless you have a clear reason, leave the offer with no expiry.

Expiry comes with the Standard plan and up.

Loyalty card for restaurants: how to start

The customer installs the free Stampino app once, from the App Store, Google Play or AppGallery, searches for your place and gets the card on the spot. No account, no email, no password. The card can also be kept in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet.

At the till, the customer holds out their phone along with their bank card. You scan the code on the screen and the points land straight away.

The number of customers is unlimited on every plan, so a good month does not turn into extra cost.

At the end of 2025 the 78 partner businesses had 57,210 active customers on Stampino.

What decides whether the program takes off is the question at the till. Where staff ask on every bill whether the customer has the card, sign-ups follow. Where nobody asks, nothing happens, however good the offer is.

The plan pays for itself

In a restaurant, a 24-EUR bill leaves you around 16 EUR after ingredients. A plan from 36.50 EUR a month, plus VAT where applicable, pays for itself with fewer than three extra bills.

That is less than one extra customer a day.

Birthday rewards

🎂

Stampinonow

Happy birthday!

A dessert on the house today. We have a table waiting.

The birthday reward appears on the card by itself, on the day. You keep no dates in a calendar and have nothing to remember.

In a restaurant, a birthday is one of the few occasions where the customer does not arrive alone. That makes the reward worth designing as a reason to book, not as a small gift:

• A dessert or a slice of cake on the house, on the day. It costs you the ingredients, and it lands at the table.
• A whole cake if they come with a party of six or more. A cake costs you a few tens of lei; in return you get a table of six who would otherwise have celebrated somewhere else.

The group version is the one that changes the arithmetic. A dessert brings one customer; a cake for six brings a bill of several hundred and, usually, a few new customers who see what your program looks like.

You can set a window in which the reward can be claimed rather than the exact day. If the customer is away on their birthday the reward is not lost, and you have a reason for a booking the following week.

Birthday rewards come with the plans that list you in the Stampino app.

Push notifications to your own customers

1

Stampinonow

Today's menu

Tom Yum soup and chicken pad thai, until 4pm.

Notifications land on the phones of people who already signed up. No ad budget, no feed deciding who sees it.

Worth sending in a restaurant: the daily menu, a new dish on the list, holiday opening hours, an evening with live music.

Not worth sending: messages with no information.

The digital QR menu, for restaurants

If you run a restaurant, the QR menu comes from the same app. The customer scans the code on the table and sees the menu on their own phone.

What it solves:

• You change a price or remove a sold-out dish from the panel and the menu updates instantly. No reprinting.
• Every dish can list its allergens, and the customer filters the menu by them. It no longer depends on what the waiter remembers.
• The menu can also be in English, which matters if you get tourists or foreign customers.
• No more carrying physical menus between tables.

The QR menu is included free from the Standard loyalty plan up. You can also take it on its own, if you only want the menu and no loyalty program.