Every "Add to Wallet" Guide Was Written for a Stamp Card
Search for how to set up a points loyalty card in Apple or Google Wallet and you'll get the same seven steps everywhere. Sign up. Upload your logo. Pick your colours. Set your reward rules. Generate a QR code. Test on an iPhone and an Android. Turn on notifications.
That's a fine checklist if you're running a stamp card, where the whole programme is one number — buy ten, get one free. Set the ten, you're done.
Points are a different animal. There's an earn rate, a menu of rewards with prices you invent yourself, and a balance that has to make sense to someone glancing at their phone in a queue. None of those are covered by "set your reward rules". And then there's the bit no setup guide mentions at all: what your staff now have to do at the till, which is more than they did before.
So here's the version for a points programme specifically. What to decide before you open any software, how the balance actually renders on the card, what's genuinely different between Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, and how to get the counter ready so week one doesn't fall over.
Settle the Format Before You Open Any Software
If you haven't firmly chosen points over stamps yet, stop here. It's the one decision that's expensive to reverse, and it's driven almost entirely by how much your baskets vary — a café where everyone spends £3.40 gets nothing from points, a salon where tickets run £15 to £120 gets a lot.
We've written that comparison honestly, including where stamps still win: points versus stamps, and how to tell which fits your counter. Go and settle it, then come back. Everything below assumes you've landed on points.
Four Decisions to Make Before You Build Anything
Open the card designer before you've made these and you'll end up rebuilding. All four take an afternoon, most of it thinking rather than clicking.
1. Your earn rate. How many points a pound is worth. One per pound is the clearest default — a balance of 240 means they've spent £240 with you, nothing to convert in your head.
2. Your reward prices. What each reward costs in points. This is where your actual generosity lives, and it's arithmetic, not instinct: reward value divided by point price gives the share of revenue you're handing back, and point price divided by average basket gives how many visits it takes to get there. The full guide to running a points-based loyalty programme works through both sums with real numbers.
3. How the balance displays. Covered below, because it's the decision nobody warns you about.
4. What you ask for at sign-up. Nothing, an email, or a name and email. This one has consequences beyond the form, which we'll get to.
Here's the useful distinction. Your colours, your logo, your reward names and prices, the number of rewards on the menu — all editable whenever you like, and the change reaches cards that are already sitting in people's wallets. Your earn rate and your programme type are the sticky ones. Switching between stamps and points is a guided job that converts existing balances, and re-pricing your earn rate re-bases what every balance already out there is worth. Neither is impossible. Both are decisions rather than experiments.
How Your Points Balance Actually Looks on the Card
A stamp card draws itself. Ten circles, four of them filled, and anyone understands it in half a second without reading a word.
A points balance has no natural picture. It's an abstract number — 340 — and 340 means nothing to a customer unless something on the card tells them what it's worth. It's the one design decision unique to a points loyalty card, and I've yet to find a setup guide anywhere that mentions it.
You've got roughly four ways to handle it, and the right one depends on how your rewards are shaped.
- A big number. Just the balance, large and legible. Best when your rewards are varied and there's no obvious "next" one — a bookshop, a deli, a gift shop. The customer reads the number and checks the menu when they care.
- A progress ring. The balance as progress towards one target. Good when you have a clear flagship reward that most people are working towards, because it borrows the pull of a stamp card — you can see how close you are.
- A reward track. One icon per reward on the menu, lighting up as the balance passes each price. This is the most honest picture of a points programme, because it shows the whole menu rather than one goal. It works when you have three or four rewards at sensibly spaced prices.
- Your own image. A branded visual with the balance sitting on it. Looks the best, communicates the least. Pick it only if your staff explain the programme out loud anyway.
Stampeo gives you all four in the card designer, with a live preview of the real wallet card as you build it, so you can look at each one before committing. In our experience the businesses that pick the branded image almost always end up switching to something with a number on it within a few weeks, once they notice how often customers ask "how many have I got?" at the counter. Whatever you build it with, choose deliberately — this is the thing your customer sees fifty times, and your reward menu is the thing they see once.
Whichever style you pick, use the back of the pass for a short reward list with prices. A balance on its own is a number. A balance next to "Coffee — 120 pts, £10 off — 250 pts" is a reason to come back.
Keep the Reward Menu Short When You Launch
The temptation is to open with everything. Nine rewards, something for everyone, look how generous we are.
Don't. The best-known study on choice is Iyengar and Lepper's supermarket experiment, where a tasting booth offering six jams converted 30% of the shoppers who stopped, while a booth offering 24 converted 3% (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000). Later researchers have argued about how far that generalises — the effect turns out to depend a lot on context, and it's weaker on average than the famous version of the story suggests. But the direction holds up at a counter, where nobody is going to study a menu while three people queue behind them.
Launch with three or four. One cheap enough to be reachable in a handful of visits, one in the middle, one that takes real commitment. Then watch what actually gets redeemed for a month and add from there, which costs you nothing because the menu is editable and the change pushes straight to installed cards.
A nine-item reward menu isn't generosity. It's a reading comprehension test you're giving someone who's holding a coffee in one hand.Building Your Points Loyalty Card, and Testing It on Your Own Phone
Plenty of businesses run points on paper — a ruled notebook behind the till, a column for the name and a column for the running total. It works, right up until the notebook goes missing, someone's handwriting is unreadable, or a customer insists they had 400 points and you have no way to check. There's a reason nobody misses it.
The build itself is genuinely quick. You're filling in your business details, your earn rate, your reward menu, and then designing the card with a preview of the wallet pass updating as you go. Under half an hour if you've done the thinking above.
What matters more is the step most people skip: put the card on your own phone before anyone else sees it. Add it to your own Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, have someone scan you, spend a notional £20, and watch what lands on your lock screen. You'll catch the things a preview can't show you — a reward name that's too long, a logo that vanishes against a dark background, a notification that reads oddly. Stampeo's setup builds this in: you get a real test card in your own wallet and a real scan before you've entered any payment details.
And when you do change the design later — new colours, a Christmas look, a reworded reward — every card already installed updates itself. No reprinting, nothing for the customer to re-download. That's the part paper can never match.
Apple Wallet and Google Wallet: What's Actually Different
Less than you'd think, and the differences that do exist aren't the ones people worry about — the basics of how a loyalty card behaves in Apple Wallet hold just as well on Google's side.
One QR code covers both. You don't run two programmes or print two codes. The customer scans, lands on your page, and gets the right button for their phone — Add to Apple Wallet or Save to Google Wallet. Same card, same balance, same you.
Both platforms notify. This is worth saying clearly, because the opposite gets repeated a lot in this corner of the internet. Google Wallet supports push messages when a loyalty pass updates, exactly as Apple does. Google's own documentation is unambiguous about it: update a pass and "a push notification is triggered and displayed on the user's lock screen" (Google Wallet developer docs). Loyalty passes there carry a dedicated points-balance field, too. Your Android customers get the lock-screen banner when their balance changes, same as your iPhone customers. Nobody needs an SMS.
The layouts differ slightly. Apple and Google each render a loyalty pass in their own house style, so your card won't be pixel-identical on the two phones. The balance is prominent on both. It's a cosmetic difference, not a functional one, and it's the reason to test on one of each rather than assuming.
One real asymmetry, and it's a Pro feature. Proximity notifications — the "you're nearby, you're 60 points off a free coffee" nudge — work on both, but Apple additionally supports Bluetooth beacons on top of GPS. If you're not doing geofencing, this doesn't touch you.
Getting the Card Into Customers' Wallets
The card is built. Now it has to get onto phones, and this is where most programmes quietly die.
Your QR code goes wherever people pay: a stand on the counter, a table tent, the menu, a sticker by the card machine. Print a proper counter flyer rather than a QR code scribbled on a Post-it — Stampeo generates one with your code already on it, which removes the excuse to put it off. The same link works in your Instagram bio, your email signature, and on your Google Business profile.
But the QR code is not the mechanism. The mechanism is somebody saying a sentence. "Do you want our card? It's in your phone wallet, takes ten seconds, you're earning points from today." A stand on the counter gets you a trickle. Staff asking gets you a programme.
From what we've seen working with businesses on Stampeo, that's the whole difference between a programme that builds and one that stalls — not the card, not the rewards, not the design. The ones who do well are the ones whose team mentions it on every third or fourth transaction without being reminded.
The no-app part does a lot of the persuading for you here — around 70% of consumers say they'd rather have mobile loyalty without an app login (CodeBroker), and you're offering exactly that.
Then there's what you ask for on the form, which matters more than it looks:
- Nothing at all. Fastest possible sign-up. But if that customer changes phone, there's no self-service way for them to get their balance back — they have to ask you, and you re-send it from their customer record.
- Email only. The sensible default. Recovery becomes something the customer does themselves, and you can send promotional broadcasts to their card later.
- Name and email. Slightly more friction, noticeably warmer notifications. Worth it in a salon, probably not at a market stall.
You can also mark a field optional, so it's on the form but nobody's blocked by it.
Train the Counter Before You Launch
Here's the operational reality of points, and the reason this article exists. Stamping is one tap. Points are not.
The flow runs: open the scanner app, point it at the customer's wallet card, the customer's name and balance appear, type the amount they spent on the keypad, check the points it's about to add, confirm. Redeeming is the same shape — the app shows the reward menu with each price and how far off the customer is, and you tap the one they've asked for.
It's a few seconds more than a stamp. Fine at a salon till, fine at a bar, and something to think about seriously if you're serving a queue of sixteen people before nine in the morning.
So brief your team properly. Ten minutes, four points:
- Do you key the amount before or after a discount? Either is defensible. Pick one and write it on a card by the till, because inconsistency here is what generates arguments three months later.
- What happens when someone's 30 points short of a reward. Show them the balance, say the number out loud, and let the goal do the work. They'll be back.
- No signal is not a problem. The app stores scans on the phone and syncs when the connection returns, so a basement, a market stall or a dead spot at the back of the shop isn't a reason to skip anyone.
- A flat phone battery isn't either. Nothing to scan means nothing to scan — but the owner can add the points by hand from that customer's record in the dashboard afterwards. Tell staff to take a name rather than shrug.
One more thing worth knowing before you plan the rota: on most platforms points sit above the entry tier, and ours is no exception. Stamps run on every plan from €20 a month, while points need Growth at €40, which also unlocks unlimited staff scanner accounts rather than just the owner's. Worth checking what each plan includes before you build a programme around a feature your plan doesn't carry.
Launch Week
Keep it short. Cards on phones, points going on, nothing clever.
Check on day three that balances are actually moving — if they're not, it's almost always that staff aren't asking, not that the programme is wrong. Check at the end of week two whether anyone has redeemed anything. If nobody has after a fortnight of decent sign-ups, your cheapest reward is priced too high, and you can fix that in a minute from the dashboard.
Put a points card in your customers' wallets
Get started free→Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need a separate QR code for Apple Wallet and Google Wallet?
No. One QR code, one link, both platforms. The customer scans it with their phone camera, lands on your branded page, and sees the right button for their device — Add to Apple Wallet on an iPhone, Save to Google Wallet on an Android. You're running one programme with one customer list, not two.
How does a points loyalty card in Apple or Google Wallet update?
Automatically, over the air. When your staff add points, the card sitting in the customer's wallet updates within seconds and the customer gets a lock-screen notification. They don't open anything, refresh anything, or re-add the card. That's true on both Apple Wallet and Google Wallet — despite what you'll read, Google Wallet notifies on pass updates just as Apple does.
How should a points balance be displayed on a wallet card?
Pick a style that matches the shape of your rewards. A big number suits a varied reward menu where there's no obvious next goal. A progress ring suits one flagship reward everyone's working towards. A reward track — one icon per reward, lighting up as the balance climbs — is the clearest picture of a points menu. Whichever you choose, list your rewards and their prices on the back of the pass, because a balance alone doesn't tell anyone what it's worth.
Do I need a POS integration to run points?
Not with a wallet-based card. Stampeo doesn't connect to tills, payment terminals or e-commerce platforms — your team keys the amount spent into the scanner app, sees the points it will add, and confirms. It costs a few seconds per transaction, which is the honest trade-off for not needing to change anything about how you take payment.
Can I change the card design after customers have installed it?
Yes, and this is one of the real advantages over print. Change your colours, your logo, your reward names or their prices, and every card already installed updates itself in customers' wallets. Nothing to reprint, nothing for the customer to re-download. The settings that aren't casual edits are your earn rate and your programme type, because changing either means converting existing balances.
How long does it take to set up a points loyalty card?
The build is under half an hour once you've made your decisions — business details, earn rate, reward menu, then the card design with a live wallet preview. The decisions themselves are the real work, and they're worth an afternoon. Add a day for testing the card on your own phone and briefing your staff before you put the QR code on the counter.
Start With the Card Your Customer Sees
Most of setting up a points loyalty card in Apple and Google Wallet is a form-filling exercise. The build is quick, the QR code works on both platforms, the notifications handle themselves.
The two parts that decide whether it works are the ones the setup guides skip: what your balance looks like to somebody glancing at their phone, and whether the person behind your counter can explain the programme in one sentence while making a flat white. Get those right and the software is a detail.
Pick your display style, keep the menu to three or four rewards, put the card on your own phone before anyone else's, and tell your staff to ask.
We build a wallet loyalty platform, so weigh our view accordingly. But none of the advice above depends on which tool you use — the display decision, the short menu, and the counter briefing apply the same way if you build the thing yourself.
Results vary by business. Stampeo gives you the tools to run a digital loyalty programme — customer engagement depends on your offer and how you promote it.