COMPARISON
What to compare your loyalty card against.
Two honest head-to-heads — including the cases where the alternative remains the better choice. No spin, no invented drawbacks.
Honestly compared · no app · GDPR-compliant
The four points where loyalty programmes really differ.
Vendor comparisons tend to revolve around feature lists. Day to day, four far more mundane things decide whether your programme runs or quietly dies after three months.
The hurdle the first time
Everything standing between “interested” and “card on the phone” costs you participants. An app download costs you most of them. Ask of any solution: how many steps is it really, and does my customer need an account?
Effort at the till
A loyalty programme only survives if your team goes along with it during the rush. Two seconds per customer is workable, twenty is not. Check whether extra hardware or a POS integration is required.
What you know afterwards
Paper tells you nothing. Without numbers on visits, regulars and redeemed rewards you cannot tune your programme — you are only guessing.
The cost after launch
It is not the entry price that counts but what follows: reprints, maintenance, further development, contract terms. With a custom app in particular, the larger share of the cost sits behind the launch.
Need the basics first?
If you are still working out what a digital loyalty card is and which variants exist, start here.