One person, in Oxfordshire.

Why it exists

Two things arrived at the same time.

The first is a problem I kept running into. Independent shops lose regulars they never find out they have lost. Not dramatically, and never with a cancellation: a customer who came in every Tuesday comes in every other Tuesday, then stops, and the counter is busy enough that nobody notices for months. Paper stamp cards do not help, because a card that lives in a coat pocket tells you nothing when it stops coming back.

The second is that this became solvable and mostly nobody had bothered. Apple Wallet and Google Wallet are on essentially every phone in the country, they update passes without anyone opening anything, and NFC reads without a camera or an app. The pieces were sitting there. What existed for single site independents was still asking customers to download something.

What fifteen years in automotive has to do with a coffee shop

More than it sounds like, which is the honest reason I thought I could build this rather than just wanting it to exist.

I spent over fifteen years in the automotive market, across marketing, branding and advertising on one side and software, reporting and analysis on the other. I built products for that trade that did a version of what this one does.

Car retail runs on exactly the problem above, at a larger ticket and a slower rhythm. A customer who serviced with you every year and quietly did not is the most expensive thing on the forecourt, and nobody sees it in a monthly total. Everything useful I learned there was about the same two questions: which of these numbers is a customer rather than a total, and what do you do on the day the answer changes.

A coffee shop is that problem with the decimal point moved. The arithmetic is smaller and the counter is closer, and the thing worth measuring is identical.

What one person can and cannot give you

Both halves, because you will find the second half on your own anyway.

What you get

• An answer from the person who wrote the code, usually the same day. There is no first line, no ticket queue and nobody who has to ask someone else.
• A price that stays where it is. £39 per location per month, with no seat count, no usage tier and nothing that grows as you do.
• A product with no investor asking it to expand into six things it is bad at. It does one job.
• Changes that happen quickly, because the distance between you telling me something is wrong and me fixing it is one conversation.

What you do not

• Cover at three in the morning. I am one person in one time zone.
• Published results from other shops. Early trials with small independent shops are under way, and it is far too soon to draw anything honest out of them. Everything on this site that looks like proof is other people's published research, said so on the page, and none of it is a TapReward result.
• The reassurance of a large company behind it, which is a real thing to want and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

This is also why the first month is free and why it starts when the tap tag is activated rather than when it is ordered. I would rather you found out whether it works in your shop than take my word for any of the above.

How the site is written

There are four rules I hold this site to, and they are worth stating because they explain some of its absences.

• No invented proof. No testimonials, no logo wall, no customer counts and no ratings, until there are real ones. Where a number appears it belongs to a published study, and the study is named beside it on the evidence page.
• No competitor named. The comparisons on this site are against paper cards and against loyalty apps as categories. I would rather win by stating my own side.
• Nothing in the markup that is not on the page. The structured data behind these pages asserts only what a reader can also see, which is why there is no review markup anywhere.
• I write it. Every post on the blog and every word of the glossary is mine, and the byline on a post is a person rather than a brand for that reason.

Where to find me

The fastest route is the contact form, which comes straight to me, or hello@tapreward.co if you would rather write directly. If you want to see the thing before you speak to anyone, the demo dashboard is open with no sign up, and the ROI calculator will tell you in ninety seconds whether the sums work in your shop.

TapReward is run from Oxfordshire and sells to independents across the United Kingdom.