Choose the right mechanic once and your card rewards your best customers from the first scan. Two properties of your business decide it, both of which you already know, and a third fact about the product decides when: before launch.
The two properties are how much the basket varies and how often people come. The third fact is that a business runs one live card at a time and switching between the two mechanics later costs every customer their accumulated progress. So this is a before-launch decision, and it is worth twenty minutes rather than two.
What does each one count?
A stamp counts a trip. One visit adds one stamp whatever was spent, so a customer buying a coffee and a customer buying a coffee and a sandwich progress at the same rate. The ladder is legible at a glance, because a card at seven of ten is obviously at seven of ten.
A point counts value. Each purchase awards points in proportion to the bill, so a large order moves the customer further. The rate at which currency becomes points is your own decision, which is the reason two points programs at two businesses cannot be compared to each other at all.
The consequence people miss is fairness in opposite directions. On a stamp card, the customer who spends the most is rewarded the least per euro. On a points card, the customer who comes every day for one small thing is rewarded the least per visit. Neither is a defect; each is the mechanic doing exactly what it was chosen to do.
Which should my business choose?
| Your business | Basket variance | Visit rhythm | Choose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coffee shop, bakery, juice bar | Low | Several times a week | Stamps |
| Barber shop, nail salon | Low | Every few weeks | Stamps, with a short goal |
| Restaurant with a set menu | Low to moderate | Monthly | Stamps |
| Restaurant with drinks and covers | High | Monthly | Points |
| Boutique, homeware, gift shop | High | Occasional | Points |
| Spa or clinic with a treatment menu | High | Occasional | Points |
| Gym or studio on a membership | None, it is prepaid | Frequent | Stamps, counting attendance |
| Gaming centre, arcade | Moderate | Frequent | Either, decided by till habit |
The two axes are not equally weighted. If basket variance is genuinely high, that fact overrides visit rhythm, because a stamp card at a business where one customer spends four times another will eventually be noticed and resented. If variance is low, rhythm decides only how far away the goal should sit, not which mechanic to use.
What other Fideliya businesses chose
Measured on 4 September 2026 across external accounts: of 24 live cards, 15 count visits and 9 count points. That is 24 businesses making 24 choices, not a market share, and it is a small enough sample that it should be read as a tendency rather than a verdict.
Two further readings from the same measurement are more useful than the split itself. On the 15 stamp cards, the median goal is 10, the range runs from 5 to 15, and 10 is chosen on 8 of them, which is a strong convergence on a round number. On the 9 points cards, the median goal is 750 and the range runs from 10 to 3,500. That spread is not disagreement about how hard a reward should be; it is 9 different points-per-currency rates, which is what makes points goals incomparable across businesses and stamp goals broadly comparable.
Why decide before launch?
Fideliya includes one active pass slot per business, on every plan from Free to Enterprise. A business runs one live loyalty card at a time, so every customer collects on the same card and the choice is one decision, made once.
Switching an existing card between visits and points is possible and it is destructive. The two progress figures are not convertible into each other in any defensible way: seven visits is not a points balance and 480 points is not a number of stamps. So a switch wipes every holder's accrued progress, and the product asks for an explicit confirmation before doing it, because the person clicking is about to reset a promise made to everyone holding the card.
Choosing wrong is not fatal, but choosing right is cheaper. The businesses that regret the choice are almost always the ones that picked stamps because stamps are familiar, at a business where the basket swings, and then discovered in month four that their best customers were the ones progressing slowest.
Next steps, whichever you choose
- Set the goal against your rhythm, not against a round number. Ten visits is a fortnight at a coffee shop and most of a year at a barber. The question is always how many weeks the goal takes, not how many visits it is.
- Put something on the ladder before the end. A band partway up gives a long goal an early payoff. Fideliya lets a card carry several, and a ten-visit card with nothing until ten is the most common avoidable design mistake.
- Name the reward as a thing, not a discount. A free item has a name customers repeat to each other. A percentage does not.
- On points, write the rate on the card. The customer cannot infer it, and a points balance that nobody can convert into an expectation is a number rather than a motivation.
- Decide before you print the QR code. Not because the code changes, but because the moment a customer has progress, the choice has a cost attached to it.
Where to set the number, with the same production distribution behind it, is on how many stamps a loyalty card should have. What to watch once it is running is on the seven numbers a loyalty program should report. And the vocabulary used throughout this page is defined on the loyalty program glossary.
Sources
The split between visit-based and points-based cards, both median goals and both ranges are Fideliya production data measured on 4 September 2026 across external accounts, with the sample size stated in the same sentence as the figure. The sample is dominated by one restaurant on the holder side, which is why the split is reported as 24 businesses' choices rather than as any kind of market share. The one active pass slot per plan and the destructive nature of a loyalty type switch are read from this product's own tier configuration and its pass update route, both named in the source note on this article. This page makes no claim about which mechanic retains customers better, because that has not been measured here on a sample worth quoting and no published figure for it survives being chased to its origin.
Fideliya is wallet-native loyalty program software for small businesses. Customers add a stamp or points card to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet in one tap, with no app to download and no account to create. Fideliya runs stamps, points, gift cards and referrals on one platform in English, French, Spanish, Italian and Arabic with full right-to-left support, and the free plan issues a real wallet pass for up to 20 customers. What each mechanic looks like in the product is described on the points page, and the plans are on the pricing page.