A digital loyalty card for your café, in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet

Your busiest hour is also your loyalty program

Morning at a café is a queue that does not pause. Someone orders a latte while the person behind them reaches for a phone, and the grinder is already running. Whatever a loyalty program asks of that moment has to fit inside it.

That is what makes a café different from most counters. Small tickets, frequent visits, the same faces through the week. Your regulars are not rare events to hunt for. They are in front of you, and the question is whether anything recognizes them.

A paper punch card recognizes them, until it is at the bottom of a bag. A dedicated app asks them to stop, search, install and sign up before their drink is ready.

A dining room can absorb a slow moment between courses. A café counter cannot. If you also seat people for dinner, the restaurants page covers what changes there.

From QR code to reward

The mechanic is the same every morning, and it runs on the wallet app already on the phone.

1. 1. Customers scan and addThey scan your QR code and tap “Add to Wallet”. No app, no form. The pass is on their phone in seconds.
2. 2. Staff scan the passAt the counter, staff scan the pass with a phone camera or a plug-in USB scanner: earn, preview, confirm, undo.
3. 3. The pass updates instantlyStamps or points land on the pass right away, and rewards are redeemed from the customer’s personal rewards page.

The passes are issued first-party: LoyalTea talks to Apple and Google directly, with no pass vendor in between.

Stamps or points, for a drink-led counter

A café menu is short, the prices sit close together, and nearly everything you sell is a drink. The choice between a stamp card and a points program is real, and you can run either.

• A stamp card counts visits. Your regulars know the mechanic from paper, it reads at a glance on the pass, and it rewards the habit of coming back.
• A points program counts what they spend. It suits a counter where a drip coffee and a matcha latte with an extra shot are not the same sale.
• Per-visit earning is a setting, so a program can credit the visit itself instead of the amount.
• Rewards are yours to name and change: the drink at the end of a full card, a pastry at a points threshold, a bag of beans.
• You can run both, if you want stamps for drinks and points for the retail shelf.

Still weighing it up? How to choose a loyalty program walks through the questions worth asking first.

What your barista actually does, and what happens on a mis-scan

At the counter the whole interaction is a single scan. Staff open the LoyalTea Merchant app on any phone, point the camera at the pass, and the screen shows who it is and what the scan will do before anything is written. Earn, preview, confirm. Earning is a scan, not a card link, so a cash regular earns like anyone else.

Now the part nobody puts on a sales page. At rush, a barista will sometimes scan twice, scan the wrong pass, or credit a sale that gets voided a minute later. That is not a training problem. That is a Tuesday.

LoyalTea is built to absorb it. Every earn, redemption and correction is an append-only ledger entry, attributed to the staff member who made it. Undo works on the spot, and a later correction is a new entry linked to the original, never a quiet edit.

The same ledger makes velocity blocking possible: repeated scans of one pass in a short window are stopped before they become free drinks.

We run it with you

We set your program and rewards up, launch it at your counter with your staff, and then run it for you: you tell us what you want, we make the changes. You keep full access to the merchant app and the web dashboard, and you can reach us whenever something needs to change.

French, the law, and where the data goes

The enrollment page, the pass, the rewards page, the staff app and the web dashboard exist in French and in English, and French is what a customer sees first. The Charter of the French language is a fact of operating in Québec.

Law 25 is part of the same reality: it governs the personal information you collect about your customers, and a loyalty program collects some by definition. None of this is legal advice, but one thing is worth knowing about where that information goes.

Our Privacy Policy names the service providers we use. Some of them store or process personal information outside Québec and Canada, primarily in the United States. As Québec's Law 25 requires, we assess those transfers to confirm the information receives adequate protection, and you can contact our Privacy Officer for details about a specific one.

For the local picture rather than the legal one, the Montréal page covers what a loyalty program looks like across the city’s neighbourhoods.

Common questions about customer loyalty at a café counter

What it costs

Free during the pilot, and we set everything up with you.