Two people at a table. One of them opens her wallet to show the card she has been filling up at your place, and her friend leans over and taps it. That is the whole of it. No poster, no code to remember, no campaign.
Your regulars are already the reason new people walk in. What they have never had is a way to do the introducing that carries all the way to your till. Every loyalty card Fideliya issues is also a referral link, so the recommendation and the signup are one gesture, made in the moment somebody asks.
How a Fideliya referral works
Every card carries a referral link and a QR code of its own. A customer shows the code or sends the link. The friend taps it, adds the card to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet in one tap, and is recorded as referred by that customer. No app, no account, no code to read out at the counter.
At that point the referral is pending and nothing has been paid. The friend has a card. Your customer has a line in the referral hub showing the friend as enrolled and waiting for a first visit.
When the friend comes in and staff scan their card for the first time, Fideliya credits both bonuses at once. The referrer’s bonus lands on the referrer’s card, the new customer’s bonus lands on theirs, and both update on their phones. From then on the friend is an ordinary customer collecting stamps or points like everyone else.
Why the bonus waits for the first scan
A signup is free to fake and a scan at your till is not. A referral program that pays on signup invites farming: a handful of email addresses, a handful of free rewards, and a channel that costs more than it returns. Paying on the first scan cannot be farmed without somebody standing in your shop, and if somebody is standing in your shop, you have the thing you were buying.
The same rule protects your regular. A customer who sends the link to ten friends is rewarded for the three who showed up, not the ten who tapped, and the hub tells her which is which.
| Moment | What Fideliya does |
|---|---|
| Friend taps the link and joins | Records the referral as pending; pays nothing |
| Friend is scanned at the counter for the first time | Credits the referrer’s bonus and the new customer’s bonus, updates both cards |
| Friend never visits | The referral stays pending and nothing is paid |
Setting the two bonuses
A referral bonus is paid in your card’s own unit. On a stamp card it is a number of visits; on a points card it is a number of points. Fideliya lets you set the referrer’s bonus and the new customer’s bonus separately, and each defaults to one. A café with a ten-visit card might give the referrer two visits and the friend one, so the friend arrives with a stamp already on the card and a reason to come back for the second.
Referrals switch on per pass. A card reserved for a club’s members, or one you would rather not see travelling, keeps the toggle off while the rest of the business runs them.
Reading the referral funnel
The referral hub shows three counts for every card: enrolled, first visit and pending. Enrolled is how many friends joined through a link. First visit is how many of them have been scanned, and therefore how many bonuses you paid. Pending is the gap between the two, the friends who joined and have not come in yet. Beside them sits the number of bonuses awarded, referrers and new customers together, and the referred customers listed by name.
Which plan includes referrals
Fideliya includes the referral program on the Pro plan at 49.99 euros a month and on Enterprise. It is not on the Free plan. Everything else about a referral, the link on the card, the one-tap join and the first-scan rule, is identical on both paid plans.
Here is the honest limit. This channel only moves when your customers choose to move it, and Fideliya cannot make them. There is no automatic email that pushes the link out for you, and a pending referral that never comes in stays pending forever. What the first-scan rule protects is your money, not your volume: you never pay for the ones who did not arrive.
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 and Arabic with full right-to-left support, and the free plan issues a real wallet pass for up to 20 customers. Referrals begin on the Pro plan; the plans are compared on the pricing page.