Will a digital loyalty card work with my till?
This is the question that stops most shops, and the answer is nearly always yes. What changes is who has to do the work, and whether it costs you anything.
Four situations, and yours is one of them
Every shop we have spoken to falls into one of four cases. Find yours and skip the rest.
| Your till | What happens | Who does the work | Typical effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Square, Toast, Shopify or similar | You connect it yourself from a settings page | You | Minutes |
| A till with a published API | Your supplier builds against one open contract | Your supplier | Days, and usually chargeable |
| A till estate with an IT person | A small connector runs in the back office and the tills call it | Your IT person, once | An afternoon |
| A till nobody can change | The programme runs beside it, from a browser at the counter | Nobody | None |
Why the last row is more common than the industry admits
Square and Shopify publish APIs because third parties building on them is their business model. Most software running on the tills in British corner shops is nothing like that: a small supplier, a few hundred customers, a support phone number and no developer documentation at all. Asking them to build an integration for one shop does not go anywhere.
So the honest position is that a loyalty scheme which depends on your till being changed is a scheme most shops cannot have. One that runs beside the till can be had by anybody, today.
What running beside the till actually means
The customer shows a code on their phone. Somebody at the counter scans it and enters the sale total, and the points land. That is the whole difference: one number typed, on a device that is not your till.
- On a Windows till with a browser, it is a second window, and the barcode scanner already on your counter reads the customer's code, because to any computer a scanner is a keyboard.
- On a locked down till, it is a cheap tablet on the counter, sixty pounds or so.
- Either way your payments, your receipts and your end of day are untouched.
The two questions worth asking a supplier
Whichever platform you are considering, ask these before you sign anything. Both answers are usually buried.
- Is the till integration in the price I am being quoted, or in a higher tier? At least one UK platform puts it in their top tier at more than four times their headline price.
- If I change tills in two years, do my members and their points come with me, or do they belong to the till?
The second question is the one that matters in five years, and almost nobody asks it.
Related
Written for shopkeepers rather than for a search engine. The arithmetic here is yours to check, and if a figure looks wrong for your trade, tell us and we will correct it.