Using gift cards as loyalty cards.

[DaoDeJing]

I've seen in other threads people mention that gift cards seem to be linked to a customer's loyalty account.

Can the gift cards be used purely as loyalty cards? What if you were to activate them with a value of $0, then swipe them during any POS transaction to associate the transaction with the customer? That way the customer can be sure to get their reward points even if they use a different card than usual or pay with cash.

And of course the gift card could still be used to store value. A neat feature would be to have loyalty rewards automatically be added to the card when earned, assuming they were a simple dollar amount. Though I think that might be difficult to implement. 

[LocavoreStore]

Now that's a clever idea! I have a suspicion that there would need to be some sort of balance on the card for this to work though. I'd love to know if it works though.

[WellDistillery]

What we want to do for our business is create VIP cards that only a select few will get. We want them to have nice plastic cards so they can feel like they belong to a club. We could just punch in a percentage off in our POS but we would like to consider having a more in depth rewards program, like Square offers digitally, where we just slide or scan the card. Then we can track thier buying habits at the same time.  

[puka]

Hey @WellDistillery - I've merged your thread with this post on a similar topic. While the feature you're looking for isn't available, the suggestion to use gift cards could work for you. The catch is that there does indeed need to be a balance on the cards for it to stay connected to the customer's Loyalty account. Once the gift card reaches $0, it will automatically be unlinked.