Which POS actually runs your loyalty program for you?

Square Loyalty is the most complete program in this comparison. You reward per visit, per dollar spent or per item bought. Customers sign up with their phone number, get a pass in Apple Wallet, and receive automatic texts when they earn or get close to a reward. VIP tiers multiply points by 1.5x, 2x or 3x, so your best customers feel the difference.

The pricing changed in 2025. Square folded loyalty into its Plus plan, at $49 a month per location, alongside other software it used to sell separately. The Free plan doesn't include it, and Premium at $149 a month covers nearly all of Square's software. If you already pay for Plus, loyalty costs you nothing more. If you're on Free, the real price of loyalty is $49 a month.

Two warnings come from merchants on Square's own community forum. Looking customers up by phone number gets slow during a rush, and cash payers are easy to miss: one owner asked for a card or barcode scan instead. Put the sign-up QR code by the register so people enroll themselves. And a coffee roaster sets a $5 minimum purchase to earn a star, so nobody splits one order into ten visits to drain the program.

Is it worth it? An ice cream shop owner on the same forum worked out a cost of about 1.43 cents per dollar of sales, rewards included, with members spending $27.12 per ticket against $14.03 for everyone else. Those are self-reported numbers, not an average. Use the 30-day trial to run your own.

Lightspeed puts in-store and online loyalty on all three Retail plans, so you never pay extra for points. Customers earn whatever way they pay, which matters if a good share of your sales are cash. You can send a birthday reward and give your top customers VIP status.

Its unique strength is migration. If you're coming from another POS or a paper card system tracked in a spreadsheet, Lightspeed imports the point balances of your customers. Nobody loses what they've earned, and you skip the awkward talk at the counter on switch day.

The Advanced Marketing add-on goes further, with automated emails, customer segments and promotional texts. Its price isn't listed anywhere: get it in writing before you sign.

The catch is cost. Retail starts at $89 a month and climbs to $289, with up to 18% off on yearly billing. For a single small shop, that's the most expensive way to get loyalty in this comparison. Also note that Lightspeed's Restaurant product handles loyalty under different terms, and what we read about it contradicts itself. This listing covers Retail only.

In Odoo, loyalty isn't another app. It's a checkbox in the Point of Sale settings. Tick it, and every sale gives the customer points. When they hit the threshold, a Rewards button shows up on the register screen, and your cashier applies it in one tap.

No other tool here gives you this much control. A reward can be a discount or a free product. It can cover the whole catalog or a few items only, and you set an expiry. So you can give away the coffee but not the pastry, or keep discounts on the items where your margin can take it.

The price is the other good news. The free plan gives you one app with unlimited users, and Point of Sale on its own covers loyalty. Standard, at $31.10 per user per month in year one, only matters once you add a second app such as Inventory.

The downside is setup. Odoo is a full business suite, and getting the catalog, taxes and hardware right takes time. If you just want a stamp card running by Friday, Square or Loyverse will get you there faster.

Loyverse puts its loyalty program in the free toolset, and none of its paid add-ons touch it. Those add-ons (unlimited history at $7, employee management at $25, advanced inventory at $25 per month per store) are for other things. For an owner counting every dollar, it's the cheapest way to get points at the register.

The mechanics stay simple: points you configure to bring people back. User reviews praise that simplicity. A rival vendor adds that there are no stamps and no referral rewards. For a neighborhood café, points are often all you need.

What you give up is depth and backup. There are no texts, no tiers and no dashboard comparing members with everyone else, the way Square does it. Loyverse also scores low in our ranking on compliance and features. Use it to start a program, and plan to move up when your regulars become a real share of sales.

Shopify POS has no native points program, and that's the first thing to know. POS Pro, at $89 a month per location, adds loyalty insights, not points. To earn and redeem, you need an app from the Shopify App Store. Merchants still vent about it on Shopify's community forum in 2026, pointing out that Square, Clover and Lightspeed have it built in.

The good news: these apps work well in store. Smile.io, one of the most used, supports Shopify POS on every plan. Customers earn at the register and redeem online, or the other way around. One customer account, one balance.

The trap is billing. Smile.io is free up to 200 orders a month, then costs $15 (500 orders), $79 (1,000) or $199 (2,500), and Plus runs $999. One merchant on that forum put it bluntly: "It doesn't make sense when you have tons of small purchases." If your store runs on small tickets, check last year's order count before you pick a plan.