SQUID has become a familiar name among independent cafés, restaurants, salons and other high-street businesses, and it's easy to see why. Replacing paper stamp cards with a simple digital system makes sense, the NFC tags are convenient, and putting multiple loyalty cards into a single app solves a genuine problem for customers.
But SQUID has evolved considerably beyond being a digital replacement for the paper stamp card. It is increasingly becoming a much broader rewards network, bringing together consumers, independent businesses and major national brands. For some businesses that will make the proposition more attractive, but for independent businesses that care deeply about keeping customer relationships direct, supporting the local economy and retaining control over their own data, it raises some interesting questions.
What is SQUID actually building?
At its simplest, SQUID provides businesses with digital loyalty cards. A customer uses the SQUID app, taps the SQUID tag in a participating business and collects stamps or rewards, while the business pays SQUID for providing the service.
Increasingly, though, the digital stamp card is only one part of the proposition. SQUID's newer Wave Points system creates a shared rewards currency across its wider network, allowing customers to earn rewards through one part of the ecosystem and use them elsewhere. SQUID itself describes Wave Points as “a rewards currency your customers can spend anywhere”.
This is an important distinction because it changes the nature of the relationship. A customer who downloads SQUID after visiting your café isn't simply joining your café's digital loyalty scheme; they're joining SQUID's wider consumer network. The more independent businesses that introduce their customers to SQUID, the larger that network becomes, which in turn makes it more attractive to other businesses and to the major brands that want access to those consumers.
There's nothing particularly unusual or sinister about that. It's a perfectly understandable platform business model, and potentially a very successful one. The question for an independent business is simply whether helping to build somebody else's consumer network is what it wants from its loyalty provider.
When local loyalty becomes a national rewards network
The arrival of Wave Points makes this philosophical difference much clearer. SQUID's own material now features major brands alongside independent businesses, including names such as Tesco, Aldi, H&M and M&S, while reporting around Wave Points has identified other large partners including Just Eat, Uber Eats, HelloFresh and Moonpig.
For an ordinary retailer this may be an advantage. For a proudly independent business, however, there's an obvious tension. Many independent cafés, shops and restaurants spend considerable time persuading customers to shop locally, support independent businesses and keep more of their spending within their communities. It isn't unreasonable for such a business to question whether it wants its loyalty programme to form part of the same rewards ecosystem as some of the enormous companies it is asking customers to choose it over.
This also changes what we mean by loyalty. The traditional coffee-shop stamp card represents a very simple exchange: you keep choosing this particular café and this particular café rewards you for doing so. A transferable rewards currency has a different purpose. It creates value by making rewards useful across the network rather than by strengthening an exclusively one-to-one relationship between a business and its customer.
Neither approach is inherently better, but they are not the same thing. An independent business looking for a loyalty system should therefore decide whether it primarily wants access to a rewards network or whether it simply wants better tools for building loyalty to its own business.
A different idea of what loyalty software should be
None of this is an argument that SQUID is a bad product. There are obvious advantages to a large rewards network. Businesses may benefit from exposure to a larger audience, and transferable rewards may be considerably more attractive to some customers than another paper card sitting forgotten in a wallet.
The question is really one of philosophy. Independent businesses aren't simply smaller versions of national chains. Much of their appeal comes from precisely the things that don't scale particularly well: personality, familiarity, local relationships and the knowledge that the people taking your money are also part of the community in which you're spending it.
We think the technology serving those businesses should respect that difference.
That's why we built IndiStamp specifically for independent businesses. We're not trying to build a consumer marketplace containing every retailer we can sign up, and we're not interested in bringing multinational brands into the same ecosystem so that they can compete for the attention of customers introduced by independents. Our job is much simpler: provide independent businesses with technology that helps them develop stronger relationships with their own customers.
That means we see ourselves as infrastructure rather than the destination. The business should remain the brand the customer cares about, while the loyalty platform quietly does its job in the background.
SQUID has chosen a different direction, and there are perfectly good commercial reasons for doing so. Building a large consumer rewards network creates opportunities that simply don't exist when you're only supplying software to individual businesses. Many retailers will prefer that model and will benefit from being part of it.
But if you're running an independent business because you believe independence actually means something, it's reasonable to want your technology providers to share some of that philosophy. You may not want your customers incorporated into a wider retail marketplace, you may be uncomfortable with the commercial use of data generated by your loyalty programme, or you may simply think that a reward earned for being loyal to your business should encourage the customer to come back to your business.
If that's what brought you here looking for an alternative to SQUID Loyalty, you're in the right place.
IndiStamp is loyalty technology built exclusively for independent businesses.
