Best loyalty program for a Flowhub dispensary

If you run Flowhub, the real comparison is narrower than a vendor shortlist. It is the loyalty your point of sale already sells you, against a platform that reads that point of sale and runs the messaging too. This page sets out what each one covers, how the Flowhub integration works at the till, and the questions to put to either option before you buy.

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What a Flowhub dispensary is actually choosing between

A Flowhub store has two routes to a loyalty program, and they differ in scope rather than in quality. Flowhub is a cannabis retail point of sale, or POS, which records every transaction, and it sells a loyalty product of its own alongside the register. Sticky Cards is a separate loyalty and marketing platform that reads Flowhub order events and runs the card, the segments and the messaging on top.

Frame the choice by what each one has to cover. A loyalty product sold with the register has the advantage of living in the register. A platform bought separately has to earn its place, by holding the card where the customer will keep it and by running the follow-up messages that bring them back.

Put four questions to either option, in this order, and stop at the first answer you do not like:

1. Does it read Flowhub orders live, or import on a schedule?
2. Where does the customer's card live, and what do they have to install to get it?
3. Which channels can it send on, and what happens when a cannabis text is filtered?
4. What happens to the member list and the accrued balances if you leave?

Where the card lives, and why that decides the program

A loyalty card gets used when it is somewhere the customer already looks. A wallet pass is a real Apple Wallet or Google Wallet card. Apple issues it through PassKit and Google through its loyalty card APIs, and it installs from a web link with no app store download (Apple Developer, Wallet Passes, Google Wallet, loyalty cards). A customer scans a QR code at the counter and fills a short form. The card is on their phone before they have finished paying.

Three properties follow. The balance updates in place when the store pushes a change, so the number on the card matches the number in Flowhub. The card survives a new phone, because it belongs to the customer's account rather than the handset. And it carries a notification channel of its own.

Enrollment is also where most programs are lost rather than won. The 2025 EY Loyalty Market Study found 92 percent of consumers enrolled in at least one loyalty program, with almost half in more than five (EY Loyalty Market Study, 2025). Deloitte's retail loyalty research puts the average consumer at eight programs enrolled and five actively used (Deloitte, reshaping loyalty programs). The gap between those two numbers is the whole opportunity: a card on the lock screen is in the five, a card in a drawer is in the eight.

How the Flowhub integration works at the till

Points post from Flowhub orders and rewards come off the ticket inside Flowhub, so the budtender never leaves the sale. Sticky Cards reads the Flowhub order event, resolves the customer, and updates the balance on the wallet pass. The reward itself is configured as a deal or discount inside Flowhub, so redemption applies on the screen the staff are already on, with no code typed across.

That one choice decides whether the program survives a Friday evening line. A reward that costs the counter thirty extra seconds gets skipped when six people are waiting. A program that gets skipped stops producing the repeat visit it was bought for. Watch the reward redemption rate, meaning the share of earned rewards that get used. Healthy signups with poor redemption is a counter problem.

The Flowhub side of the setup is documented screen by screen in the Flowhub guides.

The messages a loyalty card alone does not send

A card tracks points. What brings a lapsed customer back is a message, and in cannabis the channel decides whether it arrives.

CTIA is the United States wireless industry association. It publishes the Messaging Principles and Best Practices that carriers apply to business messaging. The May 2023 edition lists the restricted content groups the trade shortens to SHAFT, for sex, hate, alcohol, firearms and tobacco (CTIA, Messaging Principles and Best Practices, May 2023). Cannabis and CBD sit in that group with tobacco, so a dispensary's text campaigns are checked against it and can be filtered even after registration is approved. Wallet push is different: it is a notification sent to the pass over Apple and Google notification rails rather than through a mobile carrier, so that filter does not reach it.

Federal consent rules bind the text channel on top of that. The Federal Communications Commission changed its consent rules under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, effective 11 April 2025. The window for honoring an opt-out dropped from 30 business days to 10. A wider rule, which makes one opt-out cover every message program you run, is now set for January 2027. Separately, a marketing text may not go out before 8am or after 9pm in the customer's local time (47 CFR 64.1200(c)(1)).

Sticky Cards runs wallet push, email, text and MMS off the same customer record as the card. Carrier registration for your texting number is handled as part of the platform. Segments rebuild on live Flowhub events. So a win-back fires on a customer's own gap between visits rather than on a calendar, and it goes out on whichever channel will arrive.

What it costs

Pricing is built on your store count and your send volume, and the number arrives on the call. Billing is month to month, there is no setup fee, and credits do not expire. Migration of your list, your loyalty balances and your creative is included and run for you.

The ticket sets the ceiling for any of it. Headset builds its figures from register sales at licensed dispensaries. In the 12 months ending June 2026 it puts United States cannabis sales at 24.3 billion dollars across the 16 state markets it tracks, up 0.8 percent year over year. Transaction counts grew 6.5 percent in the same period. The average basket was 47.29 dollars, holding 2.74 items, across 473.8 million transactions (Headset, Cannabis Industry Statistics, 2026). More trips, flat dollars, and a basket under fifty dollars. Retention is where the room is. Headset's retailer panel puts average cannabis brand retention at 34.0 percent of tracked category customers as of July 2026, with a median of 32.6 percent (Headset, Cannabis Brand Loyalty). Two in three customers do not come back to the same name.