A stamp card is a regularity engine — buy nine, get the tenth free. A coupon is a one-shot nudge — 20% off, this week only. A gift card is a pre-paid relationship — someone hands your shop money before they ever walk in.
They each solve a different problem. Most shops only need one. A few need two. Almost nobody needs all three at once, even though every SaaS pitch deck would love to sell them to you that way.
This page is meant to help you figure out which one fits your shop, what it actually does for your numbers, and where it quietly fails. We make all three (in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, no app for your customers, set up in an afternoon), so we have no preference between them — we'd rather you pick the one you'll actually use.
The honest one-line summary.
| Card type | Best for | What it rewards | What it doesn't do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stamp card | Shops with frequent, low-ticket visits (cafés, bakeries, lunch spots, barbers, nail salons) | Coming back | Spending more per visit |
| Coupon | Shops with occasional visits or a slow week to fill (restaurants, beauty studios, dog groomers) | Acting now | Loyalty in the long run |
| Gift card | Shops people give as presents, or whose service has an obvious "treat" moment (hair salons, massage studios, specialty bakeries, brunch places) | New customers + cash up front | Repeat behaviour, on its own |
If you read that table and thought "I'm definitely a stamp card shop", you probably are, and you can stop reading here. If you read it and thought "honestly, two of those apply" — keep going.
Stamp cards: the workhorse.
The point of a stamp card is to make the tenth visit feel inevitable.
Picture a bakery on a Berlin side street. Croissant in the morning, sourdough on Saturday — the same regulars all week. They like the bakery, they'd come anyway, but the croissant on the corner is also fine. A stamp card tilts the choice by a few percent every time someone is walking past three options. Over a year, that few percent is the difference between rent being comfortable and rent being a problem.
This is what stamp cards are good at. They don't create new behaviour. They reinforce behaviour that is already almost happening.
You're a stamp-card shop if:
- The average ticket is small (under ~€15) and visits are weekly or more
- The decision to come in is half-habit, half-impulse
- There's a competitor close enough that the choice could go either way
- You can give away the tenth item without it hurting
You're probably not a stamp-card shop if:
- Customers visit once every few months, no matter what you do (think: opticians, tattoo studios, photographers)
- Your average ticket is high enough that a free one feels like a real cost
- You sell things people consider, not things people grab
For more on this specifically — the cheating question, the right number of stamps for a €4 coffee vs a €18 pizza, the staff training — we wrote a whole page about it. → Digital stamp cards
Coupons: the wake-up call.
A coupon doesn't reward loyalty. It buys attention, once.
Two scenes that explain the difference. A nail salon in Friedrichshain has the quietest Tuesdays of any day of the week — the owner can see it in the diary three weeks out. She sends a Wallet coupon: 15% off any service booked for a Tuesday, valid this month. Phones buzz. Tuesday fills. That's a coupon doing its job — moving a specific person to take a specific action at a specific time.
Compare to a café that emails "20% off everything this weekend!" to everyone, every weekend. By week three, nobody opens it. The coupon stopped being a nudge and became background noise. That's a coupon doing the wrong job — trying to be a loyalty programme.
Coupons are right when:
- You have a slow shift, a slow season, or a new product you want people to try
- You want to reactivate customers who've stopped coming in (we can target who gets the push based on who hasn't visited in X days)
- The discount is sharp enough to actually move someone — 5% off doesn't get anyone out of bed; 25% does
- You're disciplined enough not to send them every week
Coupons go wrong when:
- They become the only way to get customers in (your shop is now competing on price, and there's always a cheaper shop)
- The reward is too small to bother with
- They go to everyone instead of the right segment
The honest version: coupons are a sharper tool than stamp cards, and sharper tools cut both ways. Use them like a scalpel, not a hammer.
Gift cards: the quiet best-seller.
Gift cards get the least attention and do the most interesting maths.
When someone buys a €50 gift card for their sister's birthday, three things happen at once that no other loyalty card pulls off:
- You get €50 in cash before you've made a single coffee or cut a single fringe
- A new person walks into your shop holding a gift card with your logo on it — they didn't choose you, your customer chose you for them
- About 10–20% of gift cards (industry average, depending on category) are never fully redeemed — that's pure margin
That third point isn't a sales pitch, it's just what happens. Don't run your business on it, but don't pretend it isn't there either.
Gift cards work brilliantly for:
- Shops with an obvious "treat" angle: massage studios, hair salons, specialty bakeries, brunch spots, wine bars
- Anywhere with seasonal gifting moments (Christmas, Mother's Day, Valentine's, birthdays)
- Service businesses where the customer can pick what they want — easier to gift than a specific item
- Shops that sell something the giver themselves loves and wants to share
Gift cards are less interesting for:
- Shops with very low ticket prices (a €5 gift card for a bakery is a weird gift)
- Take-away spots where the social ritual is missing
- Anywhere the experience is too utilitarian to feel like a present (no offence to the dry cleaner)
Quiet observation: gift cards are the one card type where the buyer and the user are different people. That means your design and copy matter more — it's going to be looked at by someone who's never met your shop.
The combinations that actually work.
A small number of shops do better with two card types than one. Here are the pairings we've seen work, and the ones we'd avoid.
Stamp card + gift card (the most common winning combo).
A neighbourhood café running a stamp card for the regulars and gift cards for Christmas. Two completely different jobs, two completely different customers, no overlap. This is the most common pairing for cafés, bakeries and brunch spots.
Coupon + gift card.
A hair salon sells gift cards year-round and runs occasional Tuesday coupons to fill the slow shifts. Also clean — the gift card builds new-customer pipeline, the coupon manages capacity.
Stamp card + coupon (use carefully).
A pizzeria with a "buy 5, get 1" stamp card who also sends a "10% off Tuesday" coupon. This can work, but it can also train customers to wait for the coupon and ignore the stamp card. If you do this, keep the coupon rare and unrelated to the stamp reward.
All three at once.
Possible. Often a sign that you're solving problems by adding tools instead of choosing one. We'd push back if you asked us — and we'd lose the sale by doing so, which should tell you we mean it.
What we won't tell you in the sales pitch.
A few things we'd say over coffee that we wouldn't put on a homepage.
A loyalty card does not fix a shop people don't want to come back to.
If the coffee is mediocre or the haircut is rushed, a stamp card delays the goodbye by a visit or two. It doesn't change the ending.
Push notifications are powerful and easy to ruin.
Two messages a month is generous. One a week is the line. More than that and people remove the card — and there's no chance to win them back. We've watched shops burn through goodwill in three pushes.
The "free" item costs something.
That tenth coffee isn't free for you. It's a marketing cost. Worth it almost always, but worth doing the maths on. If your margin is 60%, a free €4 coffee costs you €1.60 to acquire one extra visit out of ten — which is excellent. If your margin is 15%, the maths is different.
Gift cards have a regulatory side in the EU.
Expiry rules vary by country. We handle the technical side (the card itself, the redemption, the balance) but the rules about when a balance has to be honoured are something you'll want to be aware of. We can point you at the basics for Germany; for other countries, check locally.
Not every customer will use it.
Some people just won't. Older customers, customers in a hurry, customers who don't care. Plan for adoption rates of 20–40% of your regulars in the first few months. That's normal and still very profitable. Don't measure success by whether everyone signs up — measure it by what the people who do sign up do next.
The "no app for your customer" part.
This is the bit that surprises people, so it's worth stating directly: your customers don't download anything.
They scan a QR code at your counter (or tap a link you send them). The card opens in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet — the apps already on their phone. From that point on, your shop's card lives in the same place as their boarding passes and concert tickets. No new app, no account, no password.
For you, it's a dashboard. You watch cards get issued, send the occasional push notification, and add stamps or redeem rewards with a built-in scanner. That's the whole shape of it.
This matters more than any feature comparison: the single biggest reason loyalty apps fail in small shops is that customers won't install them. We took that variable off the table.
Setup, honestly.
Sign up. Pick which card type fits (or ask us). Upload a logo, pick two colours, write the reward. Hit publish. Most shops are live within an afternoon.
Print the QR sticker (we send a print-ready PDF) and put it somewhere customers will see it without having to ask. Tell your staff what happens when a customer wants a stamp, books with a coupon, or pays with a gift card. None of those flows take more than a few seconds at the counter.
If you get stuck, write to us. A real person answers, usually within hours.
€10/month for your first 250 active cards.
€20/month for 500. €50/month for 1,500. Every plan includes every card type — stamp cards, coupons, gift cards, all of them — plus push notifications, analytics, unlimited templates, and same-day human support. No tier locks the good features behind a higher price. 14 days free. 45-day money-back guarantee.
Questions people actually ask.
Straight answers, no marketing fluff.
One last thing.
Most loyalty card decisions don't get made because people overthink them. The shop owner reads three blog posts, opens a spreadsheet, and the loyalty card never launches.
The 14-day free trial exists exactly to short-circuit that. Pick the card type that sounds closest, build it in an afternoon, put the sticker on the counter, see what happens in two weeks. If it doesn't earn its place, you've lost an afternoon. If it does, you'll know — because the same customers will start coming in slightly more often, and you'll see the cards adding up in the dashboard.
Build it in an afternoon. See what happens in two weeks.
If it doesn't earn its place, you've lost an afternoon. If it does, you'll know — because the same customers will start coming in slightly more often, and you'll see the cards adding up in the dashboard.
14 days free · 45-day money-back guarantee