Your regulars are the cheapest customers you will ever have. They already know where you are, what they like and what it costs. A loyalty program is just a way of saying thank you in a form they can count. The trick is to make it generous enough to notice and small enough that it never eats your margin. Here is how to set one up for a small shop, using the numbers the app works out for you.
Why points work for a small shop
A stamp card is a promise you keep by hand. Points are the same promise, tracked by your register. Every completed sale adds points to the customer's balance. When they have enough, they take them off a future purchase. There is nothing to stamp, nothing to lose, and nothing for staff to calculate.
Tiers add the second pull. A customer who has reached Silver earns faster than a new member, and they know it. That is a reason to come to you instead of the shop across the road. We covered the business case in Why Every Small Business Needs a Loyalty Program. This post is about the setup.
Three numbers decide everything
The Loyalty add-on runs on three settings under Configurations → Loyalty:
- Points for every ₱1 spent — how many points each peso earns. It can be a decimal: 1 is a point per peso, 0.1 is a point for every ₱10.
- How much 1 point is worth — what one point takes off an order when it is redeemed.
- Points needed before they can be used — the fewest points a customer must hold before they can redeem. Enter 0 for no minimum.
Multiply the first two and you get the share of every sale you are giving back. One point per peso worth ₱0.05 returns 5 percent. One point per peso worth ₱0.10 returns 10 percent. The setup form does this arithmetic as you type and shows a How it works card with the full chain: what a ₱1,000 sale earns, what those points are worth, and when redeeming starts. It also warns you when a program gives back more than 20 percent of every sale, which almost always means a point is worth too much.
Size the reward against your margin, not your sales
The share back comes out of your gross margin, not your revenue, so think of it that way. If a cup of coffee leaves you ₱30 on a ₱100 sale, a 5 percent program hands back ₱5 of that ₱30, a sixth of the margin. A 10 percent program hands back a third. The numbers are made up, but the exercise is not: write down your typical margin per sale, decide what slice of it you are happy to share, and set the two rates to land there.
A few rules in the app keep the maths honest:
- Points are worked out on what the customer actually pays, after discounts and after any points they redeem on that order.
- The part of a sale paid by gift card earns points. The part paid with points does not.
- Points are whole numbers, rounded down. A ₱99.99 sale at a point per peso earns 99 points.
- Refunds take back the points a sale earned and return the points it used, in the same share as the refund.
Set a minimum redemption that is a real visit away, not a lifetime away. A customer who can see the first reward coming comes back for it.
Tiers: reward the regulars, not everyone
Each tier has a name, a point threshold and a multiplier. A customer whose qualifying points reach the threshold moves up and starts earning at the multiplier on their next purchase. The multiplier is at least 1, so a tier never earns less than having no tier. Two or three tiers are enough for most shops, and the docs put five as the sensible ceiling.
A simple shape: a base tier at 0 points (every new member starts here the moment they enrol), a middle tier at a threshold a monthly regular reaches in a few months, and a top tier for the people who are in every week. Keep the multipliers modest, say 1, 1.25 and 1.5.
Two timing rules worth knowing. Moving up happens at once, on the sale that crosses the threshold. Moving down happens only at the monthly review on the first of the month, and only if you set a tier evaluation window (in months) so that old points stop counting. Leave the window blank and tiers are based on everything a customer has ever earned, so nobody ever drops.
What customers see, and what staff can do
A customer must be enrolled before they earn anything. Enrol them from their customer page with More → Enrol in loyalty, or from Loyalty members in the sidebar menu. Once enrolled, their profile gains a Loyalty tab showing points balance, lifetime earned and lifetime redeemed, with buttons to Earn, Redeem or Adjust points, and a Transaction History of every movement.
Adjust is for corrections. It asks for a reason, keeps it on the history, and does not count toward a tier. To grant points that should count, use Earn Points. You can also suspend a customer's earning without touching their balance; they can still redeem what they have.
At the register, an enrolled customer redeems points against a purchase once they are past your minimum. If you ever switch the program off, nobody earns or redeems, no points expire, and every balance is kept for when you switch it back on.
Points expiry: read this twice
Points Expiry is in days, and it is triggered by inactivity. If a customer earns or redeems nothing for that many days, their whole balance is zeroed at once. Points do not age off one by one. Set it long, for example 365, or leave it blank so points never expire.
A weekly loyalty routine
- Monday: look at who moved. Open Loyalty members and scan the balances. Anyone close to the minimum redemption is one friendly word at the counter away from a visit.
- Check the tiers list. If almost everyone sits in one tier, your thresholds are wrong. Nudge them, then wait for the monthly review to re-sort.
- Scan the transaction history for adjustments. Every manual Adjust carries a reason. A lot of them in one week means staff are fixing something the rules should handle.
- Enrol everyone who paid twice. A repeat customer who is not enrolled is a program that is not working.
- Say it out loud. Loyalty only works if customers know it exists. One line at the counter, every sale.
The full walkthroughs are in the Loyalty Program Overview, Setting Up a Loyalty Program and Managing Loyalty Tiers. Fuze Store is free to start, and the loyalty add-on switches on when you are ready to reward the people who keep coming back.