The Best Loyalzoo Alternatives for Restaurants
What is Loyalzoo?
Loyalzoo is a digital loyalty app for independent shops and restaurants. The business runs a points or stamp card scheme through an app or an in-store tablet, and customers stop carrying paper cards around.
Setting it up for one site is easy. If you're a small independent that wants stamps without the paper and doesn't want to spend much, it does the job.
The trouble starts when the restaurant grows, adds online ordering, or wants loyalty to work with the POS and the marketing tools. Loyalzoo wasn't built for that, and you notice quickly.
Why restaurants look for a Loyalzoo alternative
Loyalzoo does loyalty and nothing else. It doesn't connect to the other systems a restaurant runs on, and most of the reasons people leave come from that gap.
- Online orders don't earn points. A customer who orders through your website gets nothing, while the one who walks in gets a stamp. You end up with two kinds of customer on two different deals.
- Points depend on someone remembering. Without a POS link, a staff member has to add them on a tablet or the customer has to scan a code. On a busy Friday night, it gets skipped.
- Marketing is thin. You can't easily message the people who haven't ordered in a month, or the ones who always order the same thing.
- It's another app. Few people will download an app for one restaurant's stamp card, and fewer will still have it three months later.
- The customer data sits in someone else's platform, away from your orders and away from any CRM of your own.
None of this matters much with one counter and a regular crowd. It matters a lot once a good share of your sales come through online ordering, an app or a kiosk.
Flipdish: the Loyalzoo alternative built around ordering
Flipdish is the one to pick if food ordering is a real part of your business. Loyalty sits inside the platform that takes the orders, so customers earn and redeem points whether they order online, through a branded app, at a kiosk or at the counter.
That changes the day-to-day. Every transaction is tracked as it happens. Nobody needs a separate tablet, a barcode scan or a staff member who remembers to ask "are you on our scheme?"
Here's how the two compare on the things restaurants ask about most:
| Feature | Loyalzoo | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Digital loyalty programme | ✓ | ✓ |
| Integrated with POS | Limited | ✓ |
| Integrated with online ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded mobile app | ✗ | ✓ |
| Customer CRM | ✗ | ✓ |
| Automated marketing | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI marketing | ✗ | ✓ |
| Kiosk loyalty | ✗ | ✓ |
| Vouchers and promotions | Limited | ✓ |
Flipdish also gives you a branded mobile app with your loyalty programme inside it, next to online ordering. Customers use one app to order and to check their rewards. They don't have a second loyalty app that they've got no reason to open between visits.
Then there's marketing. The AI Marketing tools send campaigns based on order history, visit frequency and customer segment, and they do it automatically. Say a customer hasn't ordered in 30 days. They get an offer aimed at them, and nobody on your team has to build it.
What about Stamp Me, LoyaltyLion and Airship?
They come up in most searches for a Loyalzoo alternative, so here's where each one stops.
Stamp Me is a digital stamp card used by cafés and quick-service restaurants. It's simple, and it doesn't need a POS integration. It also has the same limit as Loyalzoo: it's a standalone loyalty tool with no link to ordering, marketing or customer data.
LoyaltyLion was designed for e-commerce shops. Some hospitality businesses use it, but it wasn't built for restaurant operations, and connecting it to a POS or online ordering takes custom integration work.
Airship is a hospitality CRM and marketing platform, used by larger UK restaurant groups and pub companies. Its segmentation and campaign tools go further than Loyalzoo's. It doesn't include a POS or online ordering, so you'd still be running those somewhere else and trying to join them up.
Each of them solves one piece. Flipdish covers loyalty, ordering, the app and marketing in the same place, which is why it's the only one we'd point a restaurant to.
What a restaurant loyalty programme needs to do
A digital stamp card isn't a loyalty strategy. For loyalty to bring in revenue, a few things have to be true.
Points have to build up at every touchpoint. If a customer orders in person, online, through an app or at a kiosk, the points should land in the same account. The moment someone has to ask staff to add them, or scan a separate card, a lot of people simply won't bother.
You need to know your customers. Loyalty works best when you can split people up by what they do: how often they visit, what they order, when they last came in. Without a CRM you're guessing, and every customer gets the same message.
It has to sit alongside other marketing. Loyalty keeps the customers who are already engaged. To grow, you also need win-back campaigns for people who've drifted off, a way to bring in new customers, and promotions you can aim at the right group.
And it has to work with online ordering. If your online channel doesn't support the loyalty programme, you're giving customers a reason to come in rather than order digitally. That might be exactly what you don't want, especially for delivery and collection, where margins and queue times are already tight.
How Flipdish loyalty works
Flipdish loyalty and retention is part of the ordering flow. A customer places an order through the website, the app, a kiosk or the counter, and points are added automatically.
Customers can check their balance and redeem rewards inside the branded app or on the website. There's no separate login and no separate scan. For the customer, it's just part of ordering.
For you, the customer CRM shows each customer's order history, total spend and how they've responded to campaigns. That's the part Loyalzoo can't give you, because it never sees the orders.
From there you can use automated marketing to send targeted offers. Two examples: a reward that triggers when a customer reaches a points threshold, and a win-back message to customers who have stopped ordering. Vouchers and promotions run through the same system, so a discount code and a loyalty reward don't live in two different places.
The AI Marketing layer handles this without a marketing team. Nobody has to build and schedule each campaign by hand, which matters if you have a restaurant to run and no one whose full-time job is email.
Designing a reward scheme that people use
The software matters less than the scheme itself, so spend a little time on it before you switch.
Keep the earn rate easy to explain. If a customer needs a calculator to work out what they've earned, the scheme is too complicated. "Spend this much, earn that many points" is fine. Anything with tiers, multipliers and exceptions needs a lot of explaining.
Make the first reward reachable quickly. People lose interest when the first prize is months away. If your average customer orders a couple of times a month, a reward that takes ten visits to reach will feel like a long wait. Something closer to a handful of orders gets people over the line and back in the habit.
Pick rewards that cost you less than they look like they're worth. A free side or drink usually costs far less than its menu price, and customers still see it as a treat. A big percentage off a full order costs more and trains people to wait for the discount.
Use the data once you have it. After a month or two you'll see who orders every week and who has gone quiet. The weekly customers don't need a nudge. The quiet ones do, and that's where the win-back campaign earns its keep.
Test it on one group first if you're unsure. A change to the rewards is easier to make after a few weeks of real orders than before launch.
Making the switch from Loyalzoo
Moving from a standalone loyalty app to an integrated platform means two things: getting your customer data across, and telling your customers what's changing.
The steps are short:
- Export your customer list and loyalty balances from Loyalzoo.
- Import the customers into your new platform before go-live.
- Tell customers in advance by email, SMS and signage in the restaurant.
- Honour existing point balances during the changeover.
The fourth one matters more than it looks. Someone who's four stamps from a free coffee and loses them is annoyed, and that's the person most likely to stop coming. Carry the balances over and say that you've done it.
When you announce the change, lead with what gets easier. Customers can now earn points when they order online. They can check their rewards in the same app they order from. They don't have to ask anyone to add anything. Most people respond well when the new scheme is easier to use and works on more channels than the old one did.
Run both for a short period if you can. Leave the old tablet at the till for a week or two with a sign pointing people to the new scheme, then retire it.
Is Loyalzoo enough for you?
If you run one site, take most of your orders over the counter and want a digital replacement for a paper stamp card, Loyalzoo works. Keep it.
If you have more than one site, if online ordering is a meaningful share of your sales, or if you want to use customer data to decide who gets which offer, a standalone loyalty tool runs out of road fast.
Flipdish brings loyalty, customer retention, automated marketing and a branded app into one restaurant technology platform. For restaurants in the UK and Ireland leaving Loyalzoo, it's the one to look at.