Start with the calendar, not the coupon
A pharmacy's repeat business runs on a calendar, not on price. A 60-count vitamin D bottle empties in about two months, a 400 g formula tin in under a week, and a 30 ml serum somewhere near week eight. Put a card in the customer's wallet, time the reminder to that clock, and you'll beat any 10% discount you could have printed.
Discounting a refill line does something worse than cost you margin. It teaches the customer your price is negotiable, and it does nothing about the real reason they bought from the pharmacy across the street. They ran out on a Thursday night, and yours felt further away. The decision was made before they left the house.
Timing attacks that problem directly. A reminder that lands on the lock screen at day 50 of a 60-day bottle arrives while the choice is still open. It doesn't need to offer anything at all. "Your usual vitamin is in stock" beats "15% off vitamins this week", because it reaches someone who is about to buy and picks the shop for them.
Two honest limits before we go further. Waya has no POS integration, so nothing in the system reads your till or your basket lines. The clock in this article is one you run yourself, at the counter, and your cashier adds stamps or points by scanning the customer's card on an ordinary phone.
Three non-prescription lines, three different clocks
Supplements are the cleanest case, because the arithmetic is printed on the label. A 60-count bottle at one capsule a day is 60 days, and a 120-count bottle at two a day is the same 60 days. Set the nudge at day 50 and you're a week ahead of the empty bottle. People skip days, so late beats early.
Formula runs on a much shorter loop and needs no reminding at all. A 400 g tin covers roughly four to seven days of a newborn's feeds, and a 900 g tin buys maybe a week and a half. Those parents are already in a pharmacy weekly, so don't spend messages on them — spend a stamp card, where a reward at 8 or 10 visits pays out in about two months. Diapers keep the same rhythm: a 60-count pack is roughly ten days at six changes.
Skincare sits awkwardly in between. A 30 ml serum at two pumps twice a day lasts six to ten weeks, a 50 ml moisturizer longer, and sunscreen depends entirely on whether anyone reapplies it. That wide interval makes skincare a bad line for a precise reminder and a good line for a points balance. Contact lens solution is the opposite: a 360 ml bottle used nightly runs four to six weeks, tight enough to schedule.
Treat every number above as pack arithmetic, not measurement. They're divisions of label doses, not intervals observed in your shop, and a pharmacist's read on a specific customer beats all of them. Your own data overtakes them inside two months: once 40 or 50 customers have two visits each, the gap between those visits is the real interval, per person. That's the number worth setting an alarm on.
Reward the visit, never the diagnosis
Here's the line I'd hold in any pharmacy. Your loyalty program records that someone came in and earned something; it never records why they came. A stamp is a fact about a visit. A note reading "diabetic, buys test strips monthly" is a health record, and you don't want a marketing tool holding one.
So, the never-store list: medicine or brand names tied to a person, prescription numbers, doses, diagnoses, allergy notes, pregnancy or infant milestones recorded as health facts, insurance member IDs, and national ID or Iqama numbers. Above all, no free-text notes at the counter. That last one is where it always leaks: a "notes" box fills up with "the lady with the eczema" inside a month, and nobody planned it. If you need a refill date, store the date and not the reason for it.
Waya's enrollment is one screen behind a QR code: first name, mobile number, one tap to add the pass to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, with a web card for any other device. There's no field for a product, a prescription, or a condition, and that's a design decision rather than a setting you can flip. The card counts visits, points, and redemptions. The dashboard reports visits, redemptions, new versus returning customers, and which regulars have gone quiet, all at the level of "came back" or "didn't".
Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law treats health data as a sensitive category, which raises the bar on anything you keep in that class. I'm not your lawyer, and Waya sells no compliance certificate. The cheapest way to handle sensitive data is to never collect it. There's an operational benefit too: reminders travel through Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, so no customer phone number is handed to a third-party messaging app, and there's no SMS anywhere in the path.
Points or stamps when the basket swings 20x
A pharmacy basket is the widest I've seen in small retail. A 12 SAR box of paracetamol and a 320 SAR run of formula and diapers are both a single visit. A stamp card treats them identically, and customers work that out quickly: they'll split one 300 SAR shop into three visits to farm stamps.
Points fix the incentive. One point per riyal, redeemable at a threshold you choose, means the 320 SAR basket earns 320 and the paracetamol earns 12. That survives contact with a clever customer. The cost is explanation time, because a points balance takes longer to describe across a counter than "buy nine, get the tenth free".
My rule of thumb: if your basket varies by more than roughly three times between a quiet visit and a busy one, run points. If most visits look like a 40 to 70 SAR basket, stamps are simpler and get you more enrollments. Waya also has balance and discount cards, and Growth allows up to 10 cards at once, so a points card for the general shop plus a stamp card for the formula-and-diapers regulars is a real setup rather than a compromise.
One card can span several branches, and every scan rolls into the same dashboard. Free covers 1 branch and 1 stamp card, while Growth covers 3 branches and 5 staff accounts. Whichever arrives first, a second location or your 100th customer, is what moves a pharmacy off the free plan.
What the messages cost, and what everyone else charges
The paid metric is messages, not customers. Free is 0 SAR forever, with up to 100 customers, 100 wallet messages a month, 1 stamp card, 1 branch, and no credit card. Growth is 85 SAR a month, or 867 SAR a year, with unlimited customers, up to 10 cards, 3 branches, and 5,000 messages a month. Premium is 149 SAR a month, or 1,520 SAR a year, with unlimited cards, branches, and messages.
The free tier is a hard stop, not a gentle slope. Enrollment halts at customer 101, and sending halts at message 101 within a calendar month. Everyone already enrolled keeps their card and keeps collecting. A pharmacy seeing 300 distinct people a month should expect to hit that wall in month two or three, so budget the 85 SAR before you need it.
Here's the competitive picture, taken from each vendor's own published pricing as of August 2026. 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, the best-known name in the Saudi market and the leader by search share, prices by quote.
Verify every one of those numbers before you decide, because vendor pricing moves. Most of them ship genuine Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes, and I won't pretend otherwise. The structural difference is where you start: all of them begin with a paid subscription, and Waya begins at 0 SAR with no card on file.
The math on one month of reminders
A worked example, with the assumptions written out so you can argue with them. Say your pharmacy serves 300 distinct customers a month. You put a table tent by the register and the cashier actually asks, so 40 people enroll in month one. I'd call that a good rate rather than a typical one.
Of those 40, suppose 18 buy on a genuine repeat cycle: a supplement, a skincare line, formula. You agree a rough run-out date at the counter and store the date, not the product. Then you send one wallet message per person, timed a week before empty. That's 18 messages, comfortably inside even the free plan's 100.
If 6 of the 18 walk in within a week of the nudge, and the basket on those visits averages 90 SAR, that's 540 SAR of business that arrived on a reminder. At 85 SAR a month, Growth pays for itself if two of those six visits are ones you'd otherwise have lost. Here's the part most loyalty math skips: you can't tell which of the six were coming anyway, and some were. Treat 540 SAR as the ceiling of what timing bought, not a forecast, and rerun it in month three with your own basket average.
The second loop matters more than the first send. Your dashboard flags regulars who've gone quiet, which in a pharmacy means someone whose 60-day pattern is now sitting at day 95. That list deserves a second message, and it's the one place a discount earns its keep: on a customer you've already confirmed stopped coming. Waya runs this loop in 100+ shops across Saudi Arabia with 5,000+ cards living in wallets, and a pharmacy is one of the few businesses where the calendar does most of the work for you.
Frequently asked questions
Do my customers need an app to use a pharmacy loyalty card?
No. Customers scan a QR code at your counter, type a first name and mobile number, and add the card straight to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. There's no download, no account, and no password, and anyone whose device supports neither wallet gets a web version of the same card. On your side, staff scan the customer's card on an ordinary phone.
Can a loyalty program store which medicine a customer buys?
It shouldn't, and Waya has no field for it. The card records visits, points, and redemptions, never a product, a prescription, or a condition. Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law treats health data as a sensitive category, so the safest handling is to keep it out of a marketing tool entirely. Prescription records belong in whatever pharmacy system already holds them, under its own controls.
How do I time a refill reminder if I'm not tracking products?
Store a date, not a product: agree at the counter roughly when the customer expects to run out, and schedule the wallet message about a week before that. Pack arithmetic gets you close, since a 60-count once-daily bottle is about 60 days. After two months your dashboard shows each customer's real gap between visits, which beats any label estimate. Regulars whose gap stretches well past their normal interval show up on the quiet-customer list.
What happens after 100 customers on the free plan?
Enrollment stops at 100 customers, and everyone already enrolled keeps their card and keeps collecting. To enroll customer 101 you move to Growth at 85 SAR a month, or 867 SAR a year, which removes the customer cap and raises the monthly message allowance from 100 to 5,000. There's no setup fee, no per-card fee, and no commission on your sales.
Does Waya connect to my pharmacy's POS or till system?
No. There is no POS integration and no hardware, so Waya sits beside whatever till or payment terminal you already run. Staff add stamps, points, or redemptions by scanning the customer's card in the web dashboard or the Waya merchant iOS app. It also means the system never sees your basket contents, which in a pharmacy is a feature rather than a gap.