How to set up near-the-branch reminders in Waya

What a branch reminder actually is

A branch reminder is a set of coordinates baked into the wallet pass itself. When the customer's phone notices it is near one of those coordinates, the loyalty card surfaces on the lock screen with a short line of your text. Nobody sends anything. There is no push you trigger, no SMS, and no message deducted from your monthly quota.

That second part matters more than it sounds. Because the coordinates ride inside the pass file, the setup has to be correct before the pass is generated, or the pass has to be refreshed afterward. Waya handles that refresh for you, which is covered further down.

Apple Wallet does most of the work here. A Waya pass carries a list of locations, a maximum distance, and the relevant text you write. Google Wallet receives the coordinates on the loyalty class and decides for itself how to surface them, so your radius setting does not apply there. The web card fallback, which any non-wallet browser gets, has no lock screen at all and gets nothing.

The card's address field is not the geofence

This is the mistake that costs merchants the most time. The card designer has two location-shaped fields: Address and Google Maps link. Both are display text on the back of the pass. Waya never converts them into coordinates, and neither one ever becomes a trigger.

The geofence comes from exactly one place: the Branches screen in your store settings. Each branch row stores a latitude and a longitude as numbers, and only those numbers get projected into the pass that lands in your customer's wallet.

The failure mode here is quiet, which is what makes it expensive. We investigated one shop whose branch pin sat about 8.5 km from the real entrance for weeks. The dashboard looked fully configured, and the reminders simply never fired for anybody. Write the address in the designer for humans to read, and set the pin on the Branches screen for phones to read.

Setting the pin, step by step

Open Settings, then Branches. Add a location and name it something your staff would recognize, like "Main store" or "Tahlia". Press Pick on map, then either search for the address, drag the pin, or use the "Use my location" button if you are standing in the shop while you do this. That last option is the most accurate one available to you.

Save, and the branch row shows the stored coordinates to six decimal places. Then go to Notifications and open the Geofence section. Turn it on, set the radius, and write the line of text you want to appear alongside the card. The slider runs from 50 to 500 meters in 50-meter steps and starts at 150.

Two caveats before you start. The Geofence settings screen is part of the paid plans: Free includes 1 branch, custom card design, and the full dashboard, while the proximity toggle, radius, and message live on Growth at 85 SAR a month and above. You can still set your branch pin on Free and turn reminders on later.

The other caveat is a precedence rule that surprises people. The single message field in the Geofence section overrides the per-branch "Lock-screen text" you may have typed on the Branches screen. If you want each branch to say something different, leave that global message field empty.

What accuracy to expect

The radius is a request, not a wall. Phone location is accurate to roughly 5 to 20 meters outdoors with a clear view of the sky, and considerably worse inside a mall, a basement parking structure, or a dense block of towers. A 50-meter radius on a unit inside a mall will misfire in both directions.

The 150-meter default is a sensible starting point. If your shop sits on a busy street with parking behind it, 200 to 300 is more forgiving. Going to 500 catches people walking past on the far side of the road, which is probably what you want for a cafe and probably not what you want for a clinic.

The phone re-evaluates when the device moves between areas, not continuously. Standing inside your own geofence all day produces nothing at all. The dashboard's own note is the honest ceiling on frequency: the text shows at most once every 4 hours while the customer is inside the radius.

Two hard limits are worth writing down. A pass carries at most 10 sets of coordinates, with the primary branch first and then the order you created the rest, so a chain with 14 branches covers only 10 of them. And the active-window selector (all day, business hours) is saved but not yet enforced, so treat proximity reminders as all-day for now.

Test it without driving around

Step one takes about 30 seconds and catches almost every real misconfiguration. Copy the coordinates shown on the branch row, paste them into Google Maps or Apple Maps search, and look at where the pin lands. If it drops on a neighboring building or the wrong side of the highway, fix it before you go any further.

Step two is visual. The Geofence section draws your radius as a real circle on a map. Confirm that the circle covers your entrance and the sidewalk in front of it, rather than the whole block or only your back wall.

Step three uses a commute you were making anyway. Enroll a card on your own phone from your own QR code, add it to Apple Wallet, then go home. You leave the area in the evening and return in the morning, which is a genuine area entry. That is the one thing you cannot fake by walking laps around the shop.

Step four is about changes, not first setup. You do not need to reissue cards. When you move a pin, rename a branch, or archive one, Waya bumps every pass for that shop and queues a refresh so installed cards pick up the new coordinates instead of keeping the old ones forever. That is not the default behavior of wallet passes, since coordinates are signed into the file when it is generated.

When nothing fires, check these in order

Start on your side. Is the Geofence toggle actually on and saved, given that it is off by default? Does the branch row show numeric coordinates instead of an empty Pick on map button? A branch saved without a pin is skipped silently, with no warning anywhere.

Then the customer's side, which you do not control. They must have added the pass to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, because a web fallback card has no lock screen. Their location services must be on. Waya never receives any customer location: the matching happens on the phone, which is also why there is nothing for you to inspect in the dashboard.

Last, the physics. If your radius is 50 meters and the customer's phone last got a location fix inside a parking garage, nothing will fire. Widen the radius, re-check the pin against a map, and give it a day of real movement before deciding the feature is broken.