The loyalty program software built for Saudi merchants

Most of your customers read Arabic more comfortably than English, so the card, the registration page, the reward text and the notification all need to work right-to-left and read naturally. A machine-translated reward line is worse than no Arabic at all, because it signals that the programme was not built for them.

The same applies to your team. If the person at the counter reads Arabic more comfortably, the scanner they use every shift should be in Arabic, or you will get mistakes at the till during your busiest hours.

Saudi baskets vary a lot by sector, and that decides the mechanic. A specialty coffee shop where most orders land in a narrow range is well served by a digital stamp card, because everyone is buying roughly the same value and a stamp feels fair.

A restaurant, a salon or a retailer with a wide spread between a quick visit and a large order should run a points system instead. A stamp treats a 20 SAR order and a 200 SAR order identically, which quietly tells your highest-spending customers that their business does not count for more. Points fix that, and tiers on top let you give genuine privileges to the customers who are worth the most.

Ramadan does not slow Saudi trade, it rearranges it. Daytime footfall collapses and the evening after iftar becomes the peak, often running well past midnight. A loyalty programme that keeps sending morning notifications through Ramadan is talking to people who are fasting.

The practical moves are to shift notification times before iftar rather than in the morning, reward the late-evening hours when you have spare capacity rather than discounting a peak you would have had anyway, and set a whole-month goal that suits a month with a strong rhythm. Eid then compresses a lot of spending into a few days, with more gifting and more customers arriving in groups — which makes it the best moment of the year to reward a regular for bringing someone new.

Growth in Saudi retail and F&B tends to mean a second and third branch rather than a bigger single site, often across Riyadh, Jeddah and the Eastern Province. A loyalty programme that lives in one shop's till does not survive that.

What you want is one customer list across every branch, so a customer earning in Riyadh can redeem in Jeddah, with per-branch reporting so you can see which location is actually driving repeat visits. Anything that requires a spreadsheet per site will be abandoned within a month.

Smartphone use in Saudi Arabia is close to universal, which is often misread as a reason to build an app. It is the opposite. Phones are already full, and a customer will not install software for a business they visit twice a month before they have received a single reward.

Apple Wallet and Google Wallet are already on the phone and already trusted. Enrolment becomes a QR scan and a phone number at the counter, which is short enough that your staff will actually offer it when there is a queue — and that, far more than reward design, determines how large your programme gets.