Why wasn't my stamp added?

Nine times out of ten nothing is broken. There’s a deliberate limit on how often the same customer can earn a stamp, and it’s being mistaken for a bug.

The repeat-scan waiting period

By default, a customer can earn one stamp every 12 hours. Scan again inside that window and the scan is refused — the stamp isn’t added and nothing is lost.

It exists because a stamp is worth money. Without it, one customer could scan the code on the counter four times while waiting for their coffee, or photograph a printed code and scan it from home every morning.

Two things people get wrong about it:

It applies however the stamp is issued. The Code Generator, the Customer Kiosk, the Control Panel, printed codes, Store PINs — all of them check the same waiting period. No method skips it. If you’ve read otherwise, that was us getting it wrong.

It’s per customer, not per business. Your next customer is unaffected. The window only governs how soon the same person can earn another stamp.

So how do you reward a bigger purchase?

Change the number of stamps in the scan, not the number of scans.

The Code Generator issues up to 20 stamps in a single scan. The keypad shows 1 to 7, and the + opens a box that accepts any number up to 20. Someone buying six coffees for the office gets six stamps in one scan and never touches the waiting period.

That’s the distinction worth remembering: the Code Generator changes stamps per scan. It does not change scans per customer.

Changing the waiting period

12 hours is a cautious starting point, not a recommendation. It suits a café where a stamp should mean a day. It’s wrong for plenty of businesses:

• A bar where a customer might legitimately buy three rounds in an evening
• A restaurant doing both lunch and dinner covers
• A gym or studio where twice a day is a normal pattern

It’s fully adjustable, from a few minutes upward, and you can change it yourself under Issue Stamps → Global Security Settings — set the 12 hours to whatever suits you. (If you’re running the Square integration, the same setting lives under POS Integrations → Square → Settings, labeled Time-Out for Customer Repeat Scans.)

If you’d rather we did it, contact us with Support as the topic and tell us the window you want.

It can also be switched off entirely. We don’t recommend it — with no waiting period a single printed code can be reused without limit — but it’s available if you have a reason.

If it isn’t the waiting period

Check these next:

“Invalid QR” on a generated code. Each generated code is single-use. Once it’s been scanned, it’s spent — a second customer scanning the same screen gets an error. Tap to generate a fresh code for each customer.

Nothing happened at all. The stamp is credited on our side, so the customer’s phone needs a working connection at the moment of the scan. In a basement bar or a bad-signal corner of a mall, the scan can fail silently. Move somewhere with signal and try again.

The stamps were there yesterday and the card looks empty now. That’s not a stamping problem. It’s almost always a second account created by a different sign-in method — see I can’t log in, or my stamp card has disappeared.

A stamp landed on the wrong card. If you run more than one program, check which one the code belonged to. Each program’s codes credit only that program.

Still not right?

Contact us with Technical as the topic. The two things that let us find it immediately are the business name and roughly when the scan happened — we can see whether a stamp was refused, and why.