How do lock-screen wallet notifications work for a car wash customer?

A wallet message appears on the lock screen through Apple or Google Wallet, not as a text

When a car wash sends a message through Waya, it doesn't arrive as an SMS or a WhatsApp text — it updates the customer's wallet pass, and their phone surfaces it as a lock-screen notification the same way it would surface a boarding-pass gate change. The customer never opens an app to see it; it's already sitting on the lock screen.

This matters for a car wash because customers are often in the car when the message would be most useful — pulling up to the branch, or driving past it. A lock-screen notification is glanceable in a way a text buried in a messaging app isn't, especially for someone who isn't going to unlock their phone and open an app while driving.

There's no separate app to install and no account to log into on the customer's side — the wallet card itself is the notification channel, which is also why there's no SMS fallback if the customer's wallet app is disabled or the card was never added.

What a car wash owner can actually send

Four automatic triggers fire without you touching anything after setup, each with an editable message: welcome on enrollment, stamp added, reward redeemed, and win-back after 14 days of inactivity (checked daily, with a 30-day dedupe). On top of those, you can send one-off broadcasts or set up scheduled campaigns, and target everyone, a lifecycle segment, a specific card, or a hand-picked list of customers.

Scheduled campaigns respect the shop's working hours — a send queued outside opening hours simply moves to the next open slot, so a message doesn't land at 3 a.m. because it was scheduled the night before. There's also a weekly peak-day reminder autopilot for shops that want a standing recurring nudge without writing a new campaign every week.

• Welcome message on enrollment
• Stamp-added confirmation after each scan
• Reward-redeemed confirmation
• 14-day win-back trigger (daily check, 30-day dedupe)
• One-off broadcasts and scheduled campaigns, working-hours aware

A worked message example: what a good one looks like

Keep every message under 100 characters and specific to something real — the customer's stamp count, a named branch, a real event — rather than a generic "come visit us." A win-back message like "You're 2 stamps from a free wash — swing by this week" outperforms a vague reminder because it references a fact the customer can check against their own card.

For geofence specifically — the automatic proximity trigger, Apple Wallet only, 50–500 meter radius, zero message quota — a line like "You're near Speedy Wash — wash #6 is free today" works because it's tied to location and stamp count in one sentence.

The limitation, stated honestly: no SMS, and the balance is shared

There's no SMS or WhatsApp channel — every message, trigger or campaign, goes through the wallet lock screen only, which means a customer who removed the card from their wallet stops receiving anything until they re-enroll. There's also no birthday-automation trigger; the birthday field exists on a customer profile, but sending a birthday message is a manual campaign, not an automatic one.

Message balance is shared across broadcasts and triggers in one monthly pool: Free gets 100 messages a month, Growth 5,000, Premium unlimited. Geofence messages don't count against this balance at all — only wallet-lock-screen sends and trigger fires do.

How the message allowance scales with your plan

For a single-branch wash sending a mix of triggers and occasional campaigns, the table below shows how the monthly allowance and top-up options line up.

Setting up your first trigger messages

Waya has no POS or till integration, so a trigger like stamp-added only fires when staff actually scan the customer's card on an ordinary phone — the message is only as reliable as the scanning habit behind it. There's no SMS to fall back on, and the Android merchant app is in closed testing, so checking message performance on Android should go through the web dashboard for now.

Start with the welcome and win-back triggers turned on before launch, then add a scheduled campaign once you've seen a few weeks of real enrollment and return data — see the full launch plan for the week-by-week sequence.

1. Step 1: turn on the welcome message

   Write a short line that fires the moment a customer enrolls, confirming the card and the reward threshold.

2. Step 2: turn on stamp-added and reward-redeemed

   Keep both short and specific, referencing the actual stamp count rather than a generic thank-you.

3. Step 3: turn on the 14-day win-back trigger

   Write it once, tuned to your wash's typical revisit rhythm, and let it fire automatically from then on.

4. Step 4: set a geofence radius if you're on Growth or above

   Configure it from the Branches screen so it works alongside the wallet-message triggers at zero extra quota cost.

5. Step 5: watch the dashboard for the first two weeks

   Confirm messages are firing as expected before layering in scheduled campaigns.