Will a loyalty card pay for itself?
The question every shop owner asks first, and the only one worth answering before any of the others. Set your average customer spend and how many extra visits a week you think a loyalty card would earn, and the sum below puts those sales against the £39 it costs. It works with JavaScript switched off as well. The numbers simply stop moving.
The arithmetic, written out
There is nothing hidden in it. Average spend, times extra visits per week, times 4.33 weeks in an average month, minus £39. That is the whole calculation.
It deliberately shows extra sales rather than extra profit. Turning one into the other needs your gross margin, which varies more between two coffee shops than it does between a coffee shop and a salon, so a margin invented for you here would be worse than no margin at all. If you want the profit version, multiply the result by your own before you judge it.
It also does not subtract the cost of the rewards you give away, for the same reason: that depends on your threshold and your cost of goods. The threshold calculator does that half of the sum, and the two together are the full picture.
What a slider cannot tell you
The extra visits figure is the one you are guessing at, and it is the one the entire answer turns on. Nobody knows their own number before they start measuring, which is the honest limitation of every calculator like this one, this one included.
The published research says the effect is real without saying how large it will be in your shop. A card handed over with a head start was completed at nearly twice the rate of a blank one. Customers visit more often as a reward gets closer. Spending rose 17.5% per week in the four weeks after a reward was claimed. Every one of those is somebody else's shop. The evidence page sets out what each study measured, and the glossary defines the two effects those numbers are made of.
The only figure that settles it is your own, which is why the free period is a month rather than a fortnight. A month is long enough to see a repeat visit rate instead of a novelty spike.
Reading the answer honestly
Three things are worth checking before you trust a result you like.
- Extra visits means visits that would not otherwise have happened. A regular who already came twice a week and now taps twice a week has not added anything, however good the dashboard looks.
- Average spend should be the spend on a loyalty visit, not your overall average. If the card is on coffee and your average basket is lifted by lunches, the coffee number is the right one.
- The fee is per location. Two shops is two tap tags, two dashboards and twice the £39, so run the sum per site rather than across the business.
Where the presets come from
The three buttons are rough averages for a coffee, a salon appointment and a month of gym membership, offered so the arithmetic is not anchored on a £3.70 coffee for a trade that charges £48. Move the slider to your own figure: your till knows it better than any preset. The page for your trade puts the same sum into the shape of your counter, with the objections that come with it.
No sign up, no email, no result withheld
The calculator runs in your browser and sends nothing anywhere. There is no form in front of the answer and no version of the number that arrives later by email. If the sum says a loyalty card would not pay for itself in your shop, that is a useful thing to have found out in ninety seconds, and you are welcome to it.