How to scan a customer's card and add a stamp

The whole thing is three taps

Open Scan & Redeem in the Waya dashboard, find the customer's card, tap Add stamp. That is the entire daily motion, and it runs about ten seconds per customer. There is no POS integration and no card reader involved: the phone already in your pocket is the scanner.

There are two ways to find a card and they are interchangeable. Point the camera at the QR code on the customer's wallet pass, or type their mobile number. Both land on the same screen with the same buttons.

Once the card opens you see the program name, the current stamp count, how many stamps the reward needs, and the date and time of the last visit. That last line is the one worth reading. If it says two minutes ago, somebody already stamped this visit.

Any phone works for this. The dashboard runs in a mobile browser, and you can add it to the home screen so it opens full screen like an app. On iPhone there is also the Waya merchant app on the App Store with the same scanner inside. The Android app is still in closed testing, so on Android stay with the browser.

Scanning the QR from the customer's wallet pass

1. Log in and open Scan & Redeem from the sidebar. If you are a cashier rather than the owner, that is probably the only screen in your sidebar, and that is deliberate.

2. Tap the scan button. The browser asks for camera permission the first time. Allow it once and it stops asking on that device. The rear camera opens full screen with a square target in the middle.

3. Ask the customer to open their pass in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet and hold up the QR, then tap Add stamp once. You do not need to line it up precisely, because the scanner checks the frame five times a second. The confirmation reads "Stamp added" and the counter moves.

Two error messages are worth memorizing. "Camera permission denied" means the browser blocked the camera, so fix it in browser settings and reopen the scanner. "No pass found for this shop" almost always means the customer opened a pass from a different shop, which happens once people collect two or three wallet cards.

When the phone is dead: the mobile-number fallback

Type the number instead. The lookup field already shows a fixed 05, so you only enter the remaining 8 digits. Pasting a full number works as well, including the +966 form, because Waya strips the country code and keeps the last 8 digits.

If nothing matches you get "We couldn't find a customer with that number." That means the person was never enrolled, not that the lookup broke. Point them at the shop's QR poster: first name, mobile number, one tap to add the pass. The number they type there is the number you will type next time.

If a customer holds two of your cards, a stamp card and a points card for example, the phone lookup shows a small picker so you choose which one to stamp. The camera path never needs that step, since a scanned QR identifies exactly one card.

Fixing a mis-scan

Mis-scans happen. The wrong customer gets stamped, or a thumb taps twice. The same screen has a deduct button: tap it once and it changes to "Confirm deduct?", tap again within four seconds and one stamp comes off. The two-tap arming exists so a sleeve brushing the screen never wipes out somebody's progress.

Counters cannot go negative. A card sitting at zero stays at zero no matter how often you deduct. If you stamped the wrong person, deduct from them, look up the right customer, and stamp normally. The whole repair takes about fifteen seconds.

A redemption is a different situation. There is no un-redeem button, because a redeemed reward has usually already walked out of the shop as a free coffee. If one goes wrong, add stamps back until the customer is whole again, and tell the owner so the week's numbers still make sense.

One thing Waya does not do is guess. It will not block a second stamp on the same day, because plenty of shops legitimately serve the same customer twice. The buttons do lock while a tap is saving, and a retry on a weak connection cannot stamp twice, but two deliberate taps means two stamps. One stamp per visit is a staff rule, not a setting.

What the customer sees after your tap

The stamp saves on Waya's side straight away, and the pass on the customer's phone updates itself a moment later through a background queue. That split is on purpose. Nobody should stand at the register waiting one or two seconds for Apple or Google to acknowledge a push.

When the count crosses the reward line, Waya banks the reward and rolls the remainder over. Concretely: on a 10-stamp card, a customer sitting at 9 gets stamped, one reward is banked, and the counter shows 0 again. If a card needs 3 stamps and you add 7, they bank 2 rewards and keep 1 stamp toward the next.

Redeem reward only becomes usable once a reward is actually banked. Before that the screen says "Customer has not reached the reward yet", which is a quiet shield when a regular is certain they are owed a free one.

None of this runs on SMS. Updates arrive as lock-screen notifications from Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, and the customer's phone number is never handed to a third-party messaging app.

Handing the till to someone else

Staff accounts start on the Growth plan: 85 SAR a month, 5 staff accounts, 3 branches. On the free plan you are the one scanning, which is fine for a one-person shop and not fine for a barbershop running three shifts.

A cashier account sees the Scan & Redeem screen and the staff guide. Not revenue, not settings, not the customer export. Adding and deducting are separate permissions, and Waya checks them on the server instead of only hiding buttons, so a curious cashier cannot get around them by poking at the page.

If the shop has more than one branch, the scan screen carries a branch picker so each visit is credited to the right place. A staff member assigned to one branch is locked to that branch. Otherwise the last choice is remembered on that device, which is what you want on a fixed tablet at the counter.

For the people doing this eight hours a day, there is a printable one-pager at the staff guide with the five steps in English, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, or Bengali. Print it, tape it beside the register, and stop re-explaining the flow to every new hire.

What this flow does not do

Waya does not talk to your till. There is no POS integration and no card reader, so the amount a customer spends is not imported anywhere. If your reward depends on spend rather than visits, the cashier types the amount into a points or balance card by hand.

The free plan stops at 100 customers and 100 wallet messages a month. Customers already enrolled keep their cards and keep collecting past that line; what pauses is new enrollments and new messages until you move up. Scanning and stamping themselves are never metered on any plan.