According to the Office for National Statistics 1, more than seven in ten retail sales in Great Britain still take place in physical stores.. Yet most loyalty and gifting programmes were built for digital journeys and that mismatch is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural failure that shows up directly in the data.
Recent independent research commissioned by Weavr2, surveying 500 UK retail sector decision makers and evaluators, found that almost 3 in 5 (58%) do not regard their redemption experience as fully consistent across digital and in store, and almost two thirds (65%) do not consider that their customers find the experience seamless and genuinely satisfying – they’re running programmes that engage customers online and then let them down at the physical point of sale. These are startling findings for the retail sector.
Why do loyalty programmes fail in-store?
Walk into any major high street retailer, supermarket, or hospitality venue and the economics are clear: the transaction happens in person. Fashion, electronics, homeware, food and beverage, the categories most suited to loyalty rewards and gifting, are still dominated by in-store purchase behaviour. Yet the mechanics of most loyalty and gifting programmes are optimised almost entirely for app and online journeys.
The consequence is visible in the failure data. 99%2 of programme operators acknowledge that their in-store redemption regularly fails. The single most common cause, cited by 48%1 of respondents, is customers forgetting or not having their card or app at the till. In an age where everyone carries their phone, this is not a technical failure. It is a design failure, built into programmes that assumed customers would always have the right tool to hand at the moment of purchase.
What is the cost of poor in-store loyalty redemption?
Clunky loyalty point redemption is easy to dismiss as a minor inconvenience. The data suggests it is anything but. When 51%2 of programme operators describe the typical in-store redemption experience as functional but forgettable, they are describing a moment that had every opportunity to reinforce loyalty – instead, at best, left no impression at all.
The point of purchase is the highest-value moment in the customer relationship. It is when intent has already converted, when satisfaction is at its peak, and when a positive experience compounds most powerfully into future behaviour. A forgettable redemption at that moment is not neutral, it is a missed retention opportunity that compounds across every transaction, every customer, every year.
Why is in-store loyalty redemption so hard to get right?
The barriers are structural, not cultural. Retailers have not resisted in-store redemption because they do not want it, they have resisted implementations that create operational problems they cannot afford. 94%2 of programme operators report a moderate to significant burden on store staff from their in-store redemption process. That burden sits at the till, in the queue, at the exact moment when checkout speed matters most.
Underneath that operational problem is an infrastructure one. Most in-store redemption has historically required direct integration with point-of-sale systems – a complex, expensive, retailer-by-retailer process that few programme operators have been able to complete at meaningful scale.
What happens to unredeemed loyalty points and gift cards?
Perhaps the clearest sign that something needs to change is how organisations currently treat ‘failure to redeem’ when it comes to loyalty and gift value. When a gift card or incentive voucher goes unused, 47%2 of companies count it as revenue, a finance line that quietly absorbs the gap. Meanwhile, 51%2 view it as a customer relationship failure owned by marketing or CRM. The same outcome is being interpreted in fundamentally different ways depending on who you ask.
That internal disconnect is not a sign of healthy debate. It is a sign that no one has been held accountable for fixing the problem and that the industry has quietly normalised a failure mode that costs real money and real customer relationships. Or perhaps, to date, it has been deemed as too difficult to solve. That is now changing.
The next phase of growth for loyalty and gifting programmes will not come from better digital engagement mechanics. It will come from finally closing the gap between where programmes operate today and where most commerce actually happens. That gap is in-store and the data makes the cost of leaving it unaddressed impossible to ignore.
How is Weavr helping to close the in-store redemption gap?
The reason this problem has persisted is not a lack of will, it is that solving it has historically meant becoming a payment company. Building redemption that works at any till required either retailer-by-retailer PoS integration or navigating the regulatory and technical complexity of payment infrastructure directly. Neither was realistic for most programme operators.
Weavr is designed to significantly reduce that barrier. As an embedded finance provider, Weavr gives loyalty and gifting programme operators the payment infrastructure to put redeemable value directly into customers’ hands – at the till, in the moment, with nothing for the retailer to change. Programme operators stay focused on the engagement product they know; Weavr handles the payment infrastructure underneath it.
What that infrastructure looks like in practice and why it succeeds where previous approaches failed, is the subject of the rest of this series.
Sources
¹ Office for National Statistics, Retail Sales, Great Britain: September 2024. ons.gov.uk
2 Research conducted by Weavr in partnership with Censuswide, [April, 2026]. Based on responses from 500 UK retail sector decision makers and evaluators. https://gifting-programmes-and-in-store-loyalty.lovable.app/
