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Why loyalty works online and used to fail in store

E-commerce knows everything about its customers; the shop knows nothing about its own. That imbalance deprived physical retail of real loyalty for twenty years. The problem was never the will, it was identification.

Online, loyalty is a technical given: the customer is logged into their account, every purchase is tracked, points add up on their own, the reminder goes out by email. E-commerce builds loyalty well because it identifies effortlessly.

In the shop, the same customer is an anonymous person who pays and leaves. To build their loyalty, you would need to identify them, and that is where everything got complicated.

Twenty years of wrong answers

Physical retail tried everything to recreate the web's identification: the plastic card (forgotten), the phone number read out at the till (the queue grows, privacy vanishes), the paper form (illegible, never typed up), the app (never downloaded), the account with an email address (spam lying in wait). Every method made the customer pay for identification, in time, in data, in irritation. The result: empty programmes, and the resigned conclusion that "in store, loyalty doesn't work".

What changed

Two recent technologies, brought together, solved the problem: NFC, which turns the moment at the till into a provable event (one tap = one real presence, encrypted, tamper-proof), and the passkey, which identifies the customer through their own phone (Face ID or fingerprint, one second, once only) with no account, no data, no app.

Identification, which used to cost time and data, now costs nothing. Physical retail finally has the equivalent of e-commerce's "logged-in customer", with one advantage the web will never have: physical proof of presence. A website knows what you buy; a tap proves you were there.

The reversal

The irony of it: physical retail, long behind on loyalty, ends up with the most reliable data on the market. Proven visits, reviews backed by presence, statistics without noise: e-commerce cannot say the same of its abandoned baskets and its bots. The shop never had a loyalty problem. It had an identification problem. It is solved.

The author

Badr El Moujtahid is the founder of Lecy and runs NFGO SAS, its publisher. Before Lecy, years at Cartier (Richemont group), in supply chain and digital transformation. Read more.

310 words · published on 2 September 2025

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