Loyalty program for stores: how to get customers coming back

Why the big chains invest millions in loyalty

Lidl Plus, Tesco Clubcard and Carrefour's loyalty card are not marketing campaigns. They are infrastructure, built and maintained by whole teams, for a single objective: turning an occasional shopper into a customer who comes back.

All of them use roughly the same levers:

• Points or coupons collected on every purchase, redeemable later. The discount is not given on the spot but on the next visit, precisely so that there is a next visit.
• Personalised offers, built from what the customer has bought so far. Someone who buys coffee every morning gets a coffee offer, not a detergent one.
• Push notifications on the phone, reaching people who already signed up, without paying for every impression.
• A digital card in an app, so nothing depends on a paper card the customer leaves at home or loses.

The logic behind it is simple and has nothing to do with the size of the business: a customer who has something saved up with you has a reason to come back to you. A customer with nothing saved decides from scratch every time - on price, or on which door is closer.

The difference between a chain and a corner store is not the principle, it is the budget. A local store has no way to build its own mobile app, but it can reach the same objective with a digital loyalty platform like Stampino.

Why points work better than stamps in a store

A stamp is a fixed unit: one visit, one stamp. It works perfectly in a coffee shop, where everyone buys roughly the same thing at roughly the same price, and the tenth coffee is the same size as the first.

A store is not like that. One customer picks up a loaf of bread, another does the shopping for the whole week. On stamps they both get the same thing, and the one who spent 200 sees immediately that they are treated like the one who spent 5.

Points offers fix that with a single setting. The customer collects in proportion to what they buy and spends the points on a later visit. Whoever spends more, collects more. In Stampino, the variant that counts on the bill value is also called Cashback.

There is a second advantage that only shows after a few months: the amount collected stays with you. A discount given on the spot is consumed and gone, and the customer leaves with no tie to the store. Points on the card are a reason to return, because they cannot be spent anywhere else.

MINI STOP 24: points per product, plus a coffee-only card

MINI STOP 24 is a 24-hour store in Piatra Neamț, Romania, with four locations on the same card. Their setup is interesting because it runs two offers in parallel, not one.

The first is the points offer, for the whole store: 1 product purchased means 1 point, and 1 point is worth 1 leu. The product is what counts, not the value of the bill.

What makes the offer work in a store are the two rules printed on the card itself, right under the offer:

• Exceptions: cigarettes, tobacco, coffee to go. These are the categories where the margin is thin or regulated, and without that line the reward would have eaten exactly the profit they bring in.
• Minimum product value: 5 lei. Without it, someone collects points buying the cheapest chewing gum at the till, ten times a day.

The second offer is a classic stamp card, for coffee only: buy 5 coffees, get one free. Here the stamp is the right choice, because coffee is the one product the same customer buys repeatedly, in the same quantity and at the same price.

The model is worth remembering, because it fits almost any store with a coffee shelf or a machine: proportional points on everything you sell, plus a fixed card on the everyday item. Coffee is excluded from the points offer precisely because it already has its own card, so the customer is not rewarded twice for the same money.

The real advantage in retail is not the reward, it is frequency. A neighbourhood customer walks past you several times a week anyway. Points give them a reason to come in, not just to walk past.

How to configure an offer that stays profitable

You have two starting points, and both can be changed from the panel after the first few months, based on the reports.

By bill value: 1 point for every 10 euros spent, 1 point worth 1 euro. A 120-euro basket leaves the customer 12 euros for the next visit, which is 10% of the bill.

By product, as at MINI STOP 24: 1 product purchased equals 1 point, with a minimum value per product and the zero-margin categories taken out of the offer. Here you keep the full value of the point but narrow where it applies.

What the reward costs you depends on what the customer spends the points on. On resold goods, where you earn little, the reward costs you almost the entire amount on the card. Hence the practical rule:

• 5% if the points can be spent on anything in the store, including thin-margin resold goods.
• 10% if they go on what you make yourself, where ingredients are only part of the price.
• Or the full value, but with exceptions and a minimum per product - the MINI STOP 24 variant.

You can leave the offer with no expiry, or set a term in days, weeks or months. The term appears on the customer's card, and when it passes the card resets. The customer is notified automatically 7 days before and once more the day before.

In a neighbourhood store, where the customer passes several times a week, a term makes sense and keeps the card alive. If visits are rare, too short a term does more harm than good. Expiry comes with the Standard plan and up.

Why you don't need your own mobile app

Lidl, Tesco and Carrefour have their own apps because they have millions of customers and development teams. For a local store, the same route means two costs, and the second one is what kills the project.

The first is development: an app for iOS and Android, plus maintaining it for every new OS version, plus the app store fees.

The second, and harder, is convincing the customer to install it. Nobody wants one more app on their phone for a single store. An app installed by 40 people and deleted by half of them is not a loyalty program.

With Stampino the customer has three routes, and none of them carries a development cost for you:

• Install the free Stampino app once, from the App Store, Google Play or AppGallery, and hold the cards of every business in the program there, not just yours.
• Or save the card straight into Apple Wallet, with no app at all.
• Or into Google Wallet, the same way.

You have no developer account, no versions to maintain and no per-customer fee: the number of customers is unlimited on every plan.

POS integration

You can start with no integration at all: you scan the QR code on the customer's screen with the phone or tablet you already have, and the points land immediately. Nothing changes at the till.

If you have real volume at the checkout, integrating with the POS changes a few things:

• Points are calculated automatically from the receipt, so nothing depends on what the person at the till remembers to do.
• The cashier does not hold a second device and does not step out of their usual flow.
• Manual entry mistakes disappear, and in a store with a queue those add up.
• The queue moves faster, which in a 24-hour store at 8am matters more than the reward does.

Integration with POS systems is done through an API and comes with the Premium plan.

Push notifications to your customers

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Stampinonow

Fresh delivery just arrived

Warm bread and local dairy, from 7am.

Notifications land on the phone screens of people who already hold your card. You pay nothing for reach and you do not depend on who happens to see a post: a Facebook post reaches a small share of your followers, a notification reaches everyone signed up.

What is worth sending from a store:

• The fresh delivery has arrived, on the morning it lands.
• The weekend offer, on Thursday or Friday.
• Holiday opening hours, when the whole street is wondering who is open.
• A new product on the shelf, if it is something customers were asking for.
• Seasonal campaigns: back to school, Easter, Christmas.

What is not worth sending: messages with no information. A customer who gets three empty notifications dismisses all of them, including the fourth one that mattered.

The card in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet

The card can sit directly in the phone's wallet, next to the bank cards and boarding passes. For a store that matters more than it sounds, because it removes exactly the friction at the till:

• The card is always at hand, in the place where the customer already keeps what they pull out to pay.
• No account, no email and no password to remember.
• It opens with a single tap, without hunting for an app among others.
• It receives notifications even without the Stampino app installed.

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

Birthday rewards

🎂

Stampinonow

Happy birthday!

A coffee on us today. Come by any time in the next 10 days.

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

At MINI STOP 24 the reward is a coffee, with a 10-day window in which it can be claimed. The window is the useful part: if the customer is away on the day itself, the reward is not lost, and you have one more reason for a visit the following week.

Pick a reward that costs you little and brings the customer into the store, not one that covers their basket. The point is the visit, not the gift.

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

What it costs and when it pays for itself

A plan with listing in the Stampino app starts at 36.50 euros a month, plus VAT.

In a store the margin is thin, so the arithmetic works on what you earn, not on what you take: on an 8-euro basket you earn around 1.60 euros, so the subscription is covered by about 23 extra baskets a month.

That is less than one extra customer a day. In a neighbourhood store that already has daily footfall, the difference does not come from new customers but from the ones who used to walk into the neighbour's shop because it was more convenient.

If you only want the card in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, with no listing in the app, the Lite plan starts at 10 euros a month plus VAT, but with a single offer and no birthday reward. For the MINI STOP 24 setup, with two offers in parallel, you need a plan with listing.

How to start

You pick the offer type, the threshold and the reward in the admin panel, and the card is ready in a few minutes. Nothing is installed on the computer in the store.

The customer gets the card in two ways. The fastest: they scan the magic QR code you put at the till, on the window or on the shelf by the door, and the card lands straight on their phone in a single scan, with nothing to search for. Otherwise, they install the Stampino app and look up the store. The magic QR code comes with the Standard plan and up, and the poster and sticker are generated from the panel.

What decides whether the program takes off is the question at the till. Staff have to ask on every receipt whether the customer has the card, and invite the ones who do not. Where nobody asks, nothing happens, however good the offer is.

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

Conclusion

A modern loyalty program does not replace discounts and does not put you in a price fight with a chain. It gives the customer a reason to come back, and gives you a link to them that does not depend on who has the bigger sign in the window.

With proportional points, a card in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, push notifications and POS integration, a neighbourhood store can offer an experience close to that of the big chains, without investing in an app of its own.

The MINI STOP 24 setup is a good starting point: points across the store, with the exceptions and the minimum threshold that protect your margin, plus a stamp card on coffee.