Stamps, points or vouchers: picking a loyalty card type
Three mechanics, three different jobs. The one you pick decides whether customers can tell how close they are to the reward without doing arithmetic.
There are three ways to run a small-shop loyalty card, and most people choose between them by feel. The choice is more consequential than it looks, because it decides one thing: whether a customer can tell how close they are to the reward without doing any arithmetic.
That legibility is not a nice-to-have. It is the mechanism.
Key takeaways
- Stamps suit shops where the order is roughly the same every time. Points suit shops where spend varies a lot. Vouchers are a different instrument entirely: a one-off, not a habit.
- In a field experiment at a car wash, customers given a 10-space card with 2 stamps already filled completed it at 34%, against 19% for an 8-space card requiring exactly the same eight purchases (Nunes and Drèze, Journal of Consumer Research, 2006).
- The lesson is not “give free stamps”. It is that visible progress toward a goal is what drives completion, which is the case for stamps over points in most small shops.
- Do not run more than one mechanic at once. Two schemes is not twice the loyalty; it is a customer who understands neither.
The short answer
| Best for | The customer sees | Watch out for | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stamps | Similar-priced repeat orders: coffee, bakery, barber | “7 of 10” | Rewarding a £2 order the same as a £9 one |
| Points | Varied spend: restaurants, pubs, salons with add-ons | A balance | Needing arithmetic to know where you stand |
| Vouchers | One-off pushes, win-backs, seasonal offers | A single offer | Using it as the whole program |
If you sell roughly the same thing at roughly the same price, use stamps. That covers most cafés, bakeries, takeaways and barbers.
Why progress beats balance
The strongest evidence for stamps is not about stamps at all. It is about what happens when people can see how far along they are.
In 2004, Joseph Nunes and Xavier Drèze ran a field experiment at a professional car wash, distributing 300 loyalty cards. One group got a card with eight blank spaces and needed eight purchases for a free wash. The other got a card with ten spaces, two of which were already stamped, so they also needed exactly eight purchases.
Identical effort, identical reward. The completion rates were not identical.
The group that could see they had already started finished at nearly twice the rate. The effect has a name: endowed progress. The practical reading for a shop is simpler than the psychology: a customer who can see where they are in a goal keeps going; one who cannot, drifts.
A stamp row shows that at a glance. A points balance does not, unless the customer remembers the conversion rate.
Stamps
The default, and correctly so for most shops.
Use them when the order is roughly consistent. A coffee, a haircut, a loaf. The customer’s mental model is “visits”, and stamps count visits.
The trap is uneven order values. If your customers spend anywhere from £2 to £9 in a visit, a stamp rewards both identically, and the £2 customer is getting a much better deal than you intended.
Card length is the decision that matters most: aim for six to eight weeks of that customer’s normal visiting. For a daily coffee regular that means around 20–24 stamps, not ten. The arithmetic is here.
Points
Use them when spend genuinely varies: a restaurant where one table spends £20 and another £120, a salon where a trim and a full color are very different tickets.
The trap is legibility. “One point per £1, 100 points for a free coffee” asks the customer to divide. Most will not, and a customer who cannot tell how close they are to the reward behaves like a customer with no card.
If you use points, do two things:
- State the reward in goods, not points. “About six visits to a free lunch” beats “600 points”.
- Keep one conversion rate. The moment there are two, the scheme needs explaining, and the counter has no time to explain it.
Vouchers and coupons
A different instrument, and the one most often misused.
A voucher is a single offer with an end date: a free coffee to win someone back, a seasonal promotion, an apology after a bad visit. It is finished when redeemed. There is no progress and no habit.
That makes it excellent for the jobs a stamp card cannot do:
- Win-backs. Somebody who has not visited in a month gets a one-off reason to return.
- Seasonal pushes. A deliberately short, dated offer that looks different from your standing card.
- Recovery. Something to hand a customer who had a bad experience.
What it is not is a loyalty program. A voucher buys one visit. A stamp card buys a habit. Most shops want the second and reach for the first because it is easier to think about.
Can you run more than one?
Yes, but carefully, and not for the same customer at the same time.
The workable pattern is one standing card plus occasional vouchers: the stamp card runs continuously and is the thing you talk about at the counter, while vouchers come and go as campaigns. That keeps exactly one thing for a customer to understand at any moment.
What does not work is two earning mechanics at once: stamps and points, or two overlapping stamp cards. Two schemes is not twice the loyalty. It is a customer who understands neither and a counter that cannot explain either.
How to choose in one minute
Answer these in order:
- Is your average order roughly the same every time? If yes, stamps. Stop here; this covers most shops.
- Does spend vary by more than about 3×? If yes, points, and state the reward in goods.
- Do you need a one-off push rather than a habit? That is a voucher, and it sits alongside whichever of the above you chose.
Frequently asked questions
Should I pre-fill a stamp to trigger the endowed progress effect? It is defensible, and the research supports it: give a slightly longer card with the first one or two already filled rather than a shorter empty one. Be straightforward about it: “your first stamp is on us” is a welcome, not a trick.
Do points work for a coffee shop? Rarely. The order value is too consistent to need them, and they cost you the legibility that makes a stamp card work.
What if I sell both coffee and full lunches? That is the case where points earn their place. Alternatively, keep stamps but set a minimum spend per stamp, which preserves the visible progress.
Can a customer hold a stamp card and a voucher at once? Yes, and it is a good combination: the card is the habit, the voucher is the nudge.
Where to go next
The mechanic is one of four decisions, and not the biggest one. Card length usually matters more, and enrollment matters more than both.
The complete guide to digital loyalty cards covers all four in order. For the trade-specific version, coffee shop ideas is the worked example, and what a stamp card is actually for is the economics in one page. Once the mechanic is settled, designing the card takes about twenty minutes, and loyalty program metrics tells you whether the choice was right.
Passumo runs stamps, points, coupons and vouchers on one plan, so the choice above is not also a pricing decision.