nfcpasses

An NFC loyalty card for your café

An NFC loyalty card—a contactless coffee loyalty card in a customer's wallet—lets people tap at the register to check in, compared with standard check-in practices that use phone numbers, physical cards, or other items that users need to manually provide. Setting up a digital loyalty card for your café—an Apple Wallet loyalty card (the tap runs on Apple Pay Value Added Services, or VAS) plus its Google Wallet twin—takes three things: the passes, a reader at the counter, and software that adds the stamp. PassNinja can handle the passes for both wallets, with nothing to apply for at Apple; the steps below cover each choice.

You can try a working sample on the nfcpasses.com live demo: add our demo coffee card (7 of 10 stamps, a free coffee at 10) to Apple Wallet and tap it in your browser.

What your customers see at the coffee bar

Apple Wallet gives people a place to organize rewards cards, boarding passes, tickets, and gift cards, and Apple Pay and Apple Wallet make it simple to enroll, reward, and engage customers on their iPhone or Apple Watch. You can distribute passes via your app, App Clips, SMS, email, near-field communication (NFC) tags, and QR codes—making them a great option for customers without your app.

With contactless passes, customers hold their iPhone to the NFC reader, waking the device and pulling up the pass, and check in with their iPhone unlocked or via Face ID, Touch ID, or double-clicking the side button on Apple Watch.

That tap uses Apple Pay Value Added Services (VAS) on iOS, while Google's Smart Tap lets Android customers redeem passes at a compatible NFC terminal (see Apple VAS and ECP explained and Google Smart Tap vs Apple VAS).

How to set up a tap-to-collect coffee card

Setting up a contactless loyalty card for your café follows three steps:

1. Get your passes from PassNinja (or apply to Apple yourself)

Adding NFC to an Apple Wallet pass requires a special entitlement issued by Apple, and Apple is selective about who gets one.

PassNinja is the easy way for your café to launch: it issues passes for Apple Wallet and Google Wallet with NFC support, and on the Apple side PassNinja signs your NFC passes under its own Apple entitlement, so your café skips Apple's lengthy approval process.

If you'd rather hold your own Apple entitlement, apply at developer.apple.com/contact/passkit (which typically runs several weeks, paced by Apple) and sign each pass with your own Apple Value Added Services (Apple VAS) certificate.

Under the hood, each Apple Wallet pass's Pass.NFC dictionary carries a message payload of no more than 64 bytes, an encryptionPublicKey for the VAS public key, and an optional requiresAuthentication Boolean (false by default; see How to read an Apple Wallet NFC pass). You either put your own public key into pass.json and store the matching private key in your NFC / VAS reader, or—when you order a Socket Mobile S550 from PassNinja and have existing pass templates created in your account—have PassNinja pre-configure that reader with the credentials that allow the reader to work out of the box with your passes.

2. Place a VAS and Smart Tap reader at the counter

Store payment terminals must already accept Apple Pay and be certified for VAS, and for Google Wallet the NFC terminal must be compatible with the Smart Tap protocol. Readers from ID TECH, such as the VP3300 and VP8300, support Apple VAS and Google SmartTap 2.1 alongside traditional EMV payments, and both the VP3300 and VP3320S support mobile wallets and mobile loyalty programs (Apple Pay VAS and Google Pay SmartTap 2.1). You can also pick from PassNinja's list of compatible NFC reading hardware—including ID TECH's Kiosk V (the VP3300 isn't on that list) and the S550 PassNinja sets up for you when you order it with pass templates in your account.

If your café runs a web POS on a desktop computer, your register page can talk to a VP3300 directly over WebHID, as our demo does. Chrome describes WebHID as a way to implement device-specific logic in JavaScript, with the user choosing the device when the page asks. It works in desktop Chrome (since version 89), Edge and Opera, but not in Firefox, Safari or Chrome on Android; see VP3300 WebHID setup.

3. Record the stamp at the register and update the pass

Each tap hands your register the pass's message; your loyalty software then adds the stamp and updates the customer's pass. Apple is plain about what that takes: you or your loyalty partner must be able to manage the passes and deploy real-time updates to them, and your point-of-sale software must handle the new modes a VAS reader brings. You can build that yourself, or let PassNinja do it: its software and APIs update your passes for Apple Wallet and Google Wallet.

Frequently asked questions

Do my café customers need to download a mobile app?

No. Apple Wallet passes can be distributed via your app, App Clips, SMS, email, NFC tags, and QR codes, making them a great option for customers who do not have your app.

Can a customer check in and pay in one tap?

Apple documents that contactless loyalty passes allow payment and loyalty check-in to be done with a single tap when customers pay with Apple Pay in your stores, or let customers check in separately from the final transaction by tapping at a certified terminal.

Does my café need its own Apple NFC certificate?

No. Apple is selective about who gets the NFC entitlement, and PassNinja issues and signs Apple Wallet NFC passes under its own entitlement—PassNinja signs the passes itself and never gives you a certificate to sign with—so your café skips Apple's lengthy approval process. If you'd rather hold your own entitlement, you can apply to Apple at developer.apple.com/contact/passkit.

Can one company set the whole thing up for me?

Yes. PassNinja provides a single platform for Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes with NFC support, signs the Apple Wallet NFC passes under its own Apple entitlement, and offers the S550 PassNinja sets up for you when you order it with pass templates in your account (Step 1).

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