The gift shopper paid, left, and you never learned their name
Perkaria puts a points card under your boutique's name, sells gift cards that never expire, and shows you which customers have gone quiet — so February is something you work rather than something you absorb.
Sound familiar?
The three holes in a boutique's year
In December, they're buying for someone else
Gift season fills the shop with people who aren't shopping for themselves. They pay, they leave, and the sale tells you nothing — no name, no number, nothing to bring them back on the 14th of February or in April. Next December you start over and buy the same customer twice.
Two good months carry the other ten
The holidays and Mother's Day do a disproportionate share of the year, then February and March go quiet and the rent doesn't. Without a way to reach the people who already like your shop, a dead month is something you absorb rather than something you can work on.
Your register knows the sale, not the shopper
The POS records $84 and a payment method. It doesn't record that this is the fourth visit this season, or that a regular from last spring hasn't been in since. You know your regulars by face — which works perfectly, right up until the day you want to count them or reach them.
How Perkaria fits
What we put on your shop floor
Points per dollar — because your baskets aren't all the same size
A $9 greeting card and a $180 coat can't be worth the same stamp. Points per dollar scale with the basket, and you set the earn rate, the caps and any bonus events yourself (a stamp card is still there if one of your categories is flat-priced). Your staff enrol the customer at the register in about fifteen seconds; they get a text with a link to their card. Points post as pending and are confirmed overnight, when your day's sales export is reconciled.
LoyaltyGift cards that never expire — and hand you a brand-new customer
Under Québec's Consumer Protection Act a gift card can't expire and can't be eaten by dormancy fees, so yours don't. You take the cash up front, and the person who receives the card walks in having never met your shop — someone your staff can enrol at the register right there. A public balance page ends the "how much is left on this?" phone call, and your dashboard tracks outstanding gift-card liability so that money is never a surprise.
Gift cardsSomething to say in the quiet months
The dashboard keeps a lapsed-regulars list — people who used to come in and haven't lately — alongside your top customers and visits per member per month. Campaigns send to those lists with the guardrails wired in: consent first, nothing between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m., at most two marketing messages per member per week, and STOP honoured instantly. Bilingual templates, French first.
CampaignsA suggested starting recipe
Points per dollar as the everyday engine, gift cards as the acquisition channel: one point per dollar with a redeem threshold you can live with, gift cards pushed hard from November, and a lapsed-regulars send in late January — when the shop is quiet and last month's gift recipients still have a card sitting in their wallet.
This is a suggestion, not a setting we lock. Earn rate, caps, redeem thresholds, bonus events and birthday bonuses are all yours to configure, and they're worth revisiting once you've watched one full gift season go by in the dashboard.
A suggestion to start the conversation — not a fixed package and not a prediction. We configure the real numbers with you on the demo call.
Questions
Questions we get asked
My baskets run from $8 to $200. Do stamps make any sense here?
Not on their own — which is why retail usually runs on points per dollar, so a $180 sale is worth more than a $9 one. Stamp cards are still available and work well if you have a flat-priced category (a coffee bar in the corner, a standard bouquet). You can run either, set your own caps, and change your mind later.
Do the gift cards expire? What happens to balances nobody ever comes back for?
They never expire. Québec's Consumer Protection Act doesn't allow expiry or dormancy fees on gift cards, and Perkaria gives you no way around that. Outstanding balances appear as gift-card liability in your dashboard and in the weekly digest, so you're tracking that money instead of hoping about it.
Do I have to change my POS?
No. There's no POS integration and no API required — Perkaria runs beside your register and reconciles against the daily sales file your system already exports. That's also why points and stamps post as pending first and are verified overnight: the reconciliation is what confirms them, so nothing lands on a customer's card that your own sales file doesn't back up.
Ready to meet your regulars?
Book a 20-minute demo — we'll set up a sample program with your brand on it, live, while we talk.