Most loyalty products ask which till you run before they ask anything about your customers. There is a sound reason for that, and there is a cost to it, and the two are rarely explained in the same place.
Why loyalty attaches to a till in the first place.
The till is the one thing in the building that knows what a person spent. If your programme gives a point per pound, or 5% back as credit, that number has to come from somewhere, and the receipt is the obvious place. So the loyalty product plugs into the till, reads the basket and does the arithmetic. Square Loyalty works that way: the customer types a phone number into the Square terminal, Square already has the basket, and the points land without anyone counting anything.
What that buys you is real. Rewards become proportional, so a £32 lunch counts for more than a £3 flat white. Enrolment is one field on a screen the customer is already looking at. And the reporting goes down to the line item: you can see what loyalty customers order, not only how often they come.
What the integration costs you.
Two things. The first is the bill, which usually counts locations and sometimes counts success. Square Loyalty publishes £25, £45 and £65 a month, stepping up by monthly loyalty visits, per location, on top of Square’s processing, with Marketing a further £9 to £29. Loyalzoo publishes £57 Grow and £127 Smart a month plus VAT, per location as published. A second site is a second bill.
The second cost is quieter. Your programme becomes a feature of somebody else’s checkout. Tills get changed – for rates, for hardware, because the lease moves – and when yours does, your customers’ balances sit inside the product you are leaving. You rebuild the programme in the new till’s version of loyalty, or you lose it. Either way, the people who earned those stamps notice.
A visit-based card never asks the till anything.
A stamp card puts a different question. Not “what was this basket worth”, but “did this person come in and buy something”. That is a yes or a no, and a human at the counter can confirm it in a second. No receipt required.
In Places 360 the confirmation is a tap. You put a Places 360 tag by the till and register it by tapping it in the app.
A customer then taps their phone to the tag and the stamp is checked on the server against that tag’s UID, a per-card cooldown, a daily cap and, if you want it, a geofence. If a phone will not tap, a member of staff scans the customer’s code behind a PIN, and the customer’s own stamp code works with no signal at all. Nothing in that chain touches your till. The till rings the sale, exactly as it did yesterday.
Points need the amount, not the till.
A point per pound needs one number: what the customer paid. An order placed through Places 360 already knows it, so it earns points by itself once it is done. At the counter, a member of staff scans the customer’s code and types what they paid, and the points land, with a notification to the customer. The card machine never has to know. How points work.
What you genuinely give up.
Two things, named plainly:
- Points straight off the receipt. Nothing reads your till’s sales for you. For a sale rung up there, someone types the amount, which takes seconds but is still a step a person does.
- Receipt-level reporting. You will not see which items your repeat customers buy, because the item data stays in the till.
If either of those is load-bearing for your business, an integration earns its money and you should buy one.
What you do not give up.
- The customer relationship: who came back, how often, who has gone quiet.
- The card, with several milestones on one card, several cards running at once, and automatic reset with a cycle counter.
- The rewards: a free item, a percentage off or an amount off, plus welcome offers, standalone offers with claim rules and promo codes.
- The reporting a visit-based programme runs on – stamps, redemptions, repeat visits, activity by day.
- Everything around the card: your own page in the app and on the web (on your own domain from Regulars), menus and ordering that take real card payments, a team with roles and a time clock.
How to decide, in five questions.
- Do your baskets vary enough that one stamp for all of them feels unfair? A café where nearly everyone buys a coffee is a different case from a deli taking £4 and £40 orders. Points on spend answer that without an integration; the question is whether typing the amount at the counter suits your team.
- How likely are you to change till in the next three years? The less certain you are, the less you want the programme living inside one.
- How many sites do you run, or expect to? Per-location pricing compounds quietly.
- Is your real question “what do they order” or “how often do they come back”? Only the first needs the receipt.
- What does your till’s own loyalty cost, and what does it do? If you are settled inside one till and have no intention of leaving, that loyalty may be the right answer. This is not an article written to talk you out of it.
The middle path.
You do not have to choose once and for ever. Run the card where it cannot be stranded, and add a till integration later if it earns its place. That is the shape Places 360 is built in: the card, the page and the customer relationship sit with us, beside any till or none, and Square POS support is there for venues on Square so the ordering side and the till line up. Change the hardware and the card is untouched.
The price does not count locations either. The Free plan is £0 a month, no contract, no setup fee, cancel any time. Regulars is £19 + VAT (£22.80 inc. VAT) a month, Growth £59 + VAT (£70.80 inc. VAT) and a Branded app £99 + VAT (£118.80 inc. VAT), each per business and covering every location, so a second café is not a second subscription. The detail is on plans and pricing.
The mechanics are written up in full on the loyalty card and the tap, and there is a dated, side-by-side look at Square Loyalty if that is the alternative on your desk.
Competitor prices are as published and last checked on 12 September 2026, and may have changed since. Not affiliated with Square or Loyalzoo; the names are used to identify the products.
Run the card beside your till, or without one.
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