Your basket spread picks the card, not your visit count
A perfume shop should run a points card, not a stamp card, and the reason is arithmetic rather than taste. If your smallest regular sale is a 45 SAR box of bakhoor and your largest is a 1,200 SAR tola of dahn al oud, one stamp cannot honestly stand for both. A tola is the traditional unit for oud oil, roughly 12 ml.
Here is the test. Take the smallest sale you see every week and the largest one you see every week. If the big one is more than 3 times the small one, a stamp card is mispricing your reward, and perfume shops routinely run 20 times or more. Frequency compounds it, because a spray bottle lasts a season and a tola of oil can last a year, so an eight-stamp card becomes a two-year wait.
One limitation up front. Waya has no POS integration, so nothing reads the basket amount for you. Your cashier scans the customer's card on an ordinary phone and enters the points at the till, which takes a few seconds and only works if the staff do it every time.
The eight-stamp card, priced out
Run buy 8, get 1 free against the two customers you actually have. Your bakhoor regular buys eight 45 SAR boxes over a few months, spends 360 SAR, and then takes a free item off the shelf. If that item is a 250 SAR bottle, you handed back 69% of everything he spent.
Cap the reward at any bakhoor box up to 60 SAR and the cost comes under control. But now your program's top prize is worth 60 SAR to a customer base that buys 800 SAR oils.
The second customer spends 1,200 SAR on one tola and earns a single stamp. To finish the card he would have to spend 9,600 SAR. He opens the pass and sees one stamp out of eight, with a box of incense at the end of it. Stamps overpay your cheapest basket and under-reward your most valuable one, and both customers can read the card well enough to notice.
A points balance at 1 point per SAR, and what it costs
Points fix the mispricing because the earn rate and the spend move together. A cashier can explain the setup in one sentence: 1 point per 1 SAR spent, and 500 points redeem for 50 SAR of value. That is a flat 10% reward rate whether the basket is 45 SAR or 1,200 SAR.
The oud buyer now holds 1,200 points before he leaves the shop, past the redemption threshold on his first visit. Cost the program out with your assumptions written down: 400 paying customers a month at a 210 SAR average basket is 84,000 SAR of revenue, and if 30% of that comes from cardholders you are budgeting 2,520 SAR a month of reward value at full redemption. Unredeemed points lower the real number. Do not build your margin on customers forgetting.
The honest note on our own pricing. Waya's free plan is 0 SAR forever for up to 100 customers, but it includes one stamp card only, so the points design in this article is not available on it. Points and the other card types start on Growth at 85 SAR a month, or 867 SAR a year.
Reward with a decant, not a discount
Taking 50 SAR off the bill costs you exactly 50 SAR and teaches the customer to wait for a markdown. A decant does better on both counts. Decants are small pours of an expensive oil into a 3 ml bottle, and they are the natural reward currency in this trade.
Check the idea against your own cost sheet. If you sell a 3 ml decant of a house mukhallat at 90 SAR and your all-in cost on that pour is 30 SAR, then 500 points spent on the decant hands over 90 SAR of perceived value for 30 SAR of cash. The same 500 points taken off the bill costs you 50 SAR and leaves nothing behind.
Pick the reward one shelf above where the customer normally shops. Someone who buys 250 SAR sprays should redeem a decant of the 1,200 SAR oil, not a second bottle of what she already owns. Then add a refill tier: at 1,000 points, a free 6 ml refill of your house blend when she brings the bottle back. An empty bottle is a deadline she sets for herself, and it gives you a walk-in reason in a month with no occasion in it.
Gifting occasions are the real trigger, so send early
Personal reorders will not fill your calendar. In Saudi Arabia, oud and bakhoor are standard hospitality and gift items, so most of the volume sits on the occasion calendar rather than on any one person's reorder cycle. Two dates are fixed: Founding Day on 22 February and National Day on 23 September.
Ramadan, the month of fasting, and the two Eids follow the Hijri calendar, so they land about 11 days earlier each Gregorian year. Check them annually instead of reusing last year's plan, and add the spring cluster of weddings and graduations. Send 10 to 14 days ahead of each occasion rather than on the eve of it, because a gift in the 200 to 1,000 SAR range gets bought in advance.
The mechanism is the pass itself: it updates on its own and the message lands on the lock screen, with no SMS involved. For the passive branch-proximity reminder, set it on the Branches screen. The card's own address and maps fields do nothing for the geofence, and that is the mix-up I see most often. One more matter of judgment: a perfume customer counts as quiet at 120 days, not at the 30 days a cafe would use.
What this costs next to the other options
Published Saudi prices as of August 2026, and worth checking yourself before you commit to anything. Btaqa lists tiers at 108, 250, and 380 SAR a month. OneCup is around 150 SAR a month, and Watily is 149 SAR a month with loyalty bundled into a wider plan. Niqati is the best-known name in this market and the leader by search share, and its pricing is quote-based, so you have to ask.
Most of them ship wallet passes, and Niqati's position is earned, so I will not pretend otherwise. Generic international punch-card apps are a different trade, because the customer has to install a shared consumer app first, and that is the step most people skip. The structural difference on our side is the starting line: every one of those tools begins with a paid subscription.
Treat the free plan as a test rig rather than the finished program. Enroll your first 100 customers on a stamp card, watch whether the staff scan at the till without being chased, and only then pay 85 SAR a month for the points design above. Free caps wallet messages at 100 a month, Growth raises that to 5,000, and Premium at 149 SAR a month drops the caps if you outgrow 3 branches. For scale on our side, the figures we publish on our Arabic homepage are 100+ shops across Saudi Arabia, 5,000+ cards living in wallets, and 4.9 out of 5 rated by 90 merchants.
Frequently asked questions
Should a perfume shop use a stamp card or a points card?
A perfume shop should use a points card, because stamps price every visit the same while perfume baskets do not. Run the spread test: if the largest sale you see every week is more than 3 times the smallest, stamps overpay your cheapest basket and under-reward your best customer. Points at 1 point per 1 SAR keep the reward proportional to spend. Stamps still win for a narrow, repeated basket like coffee.
Can I run a points card on Waya's free plan?
No, the free plan includes one stamp card only. It is 0 SAR forever and covers up to 100 customers and 100 wallet messages a month, while points and the other card types start on Growth at 85 SAR a month, or 867 SAR a year. Use the free stamp card first to prove your staff scan reliably at the till. If you pass the 100-customer limit, already-enrolled customers keep their cards and keep collecting.
What is a good loyalty reward for an oud or perfume shop?
A 3 ml decant of an oil that sits one shelf above what the customer normally buys. It carries high perceived value at a low cash cost compared with taking the same amount off the bill, and it doubles as a paid sample of your highest-margin stock. A free refill of your house blend when the customer brings the empty bottle back works well as a second, higher tier.
When should I send a loyalty message before Eid?
Send it 10 to 14 days before the occasion, not on the eve of it. A gift in the 200 to 1,000 SAR range is bought in advance, so a reminder the night before Eid arrives after the money is spent. Ramadan and both Eids move about 11 days earlier each Gregorian year, so check the dates annually rather than reusing last year's schedule.
Do my customers need an app to hold the card?
No. The customer scans your QR code, types a first name and mobile number on one screen, and taps once to add the card to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. Any device that supports neither gets a web card instead. There is no account, no password, and no app to install on either side of the counter.