Across UAE SME merchants on the Fortis network, we saw one thing that 81 per cent of customers visit once and never return.
The UAE’s loyalty market is booming, reaching $490.8 million in 2025 to a projected reach of $817.6 million by 2029. It is one of the fastest-expanding segments in the region’s retail economy. Loyalty programmes are increasingly digitised, with mobile apps, digital wallets, and online platforms becoming central to their design.
Yet walk into most small restaurants, cafés, or independent retailers across Dubai or Abu Dhabi, and you will find something conspicuously absent: a loyalty programme that works.
The scale gap tells part of the story. The Shukran loyalty platform, for instance, has more than 14 million members across the GCC, over 80 per cent based in the UAE. For a small retailer or restaurant, competing with that level of sophistication – the tech investment, the data infrastructure, the marketing muscle – can feel impossible before it even begins.
The acquisition trap
The most persistent challenge is mindset. Fortis’ research conducted across UAE merchants reveals that the overwhelming majority of SME energy and spend goes into customer acquisition, while retention is left largely to chance.
This is understandable, but expensive.
Acquiring a new customer costs five times as much as retaining an existing one. Merchants continue to pour budgets into Instagram marketing and delivery platform commissions, with some paying aggregators as much as 65 per cent per sale and almost nothing invested in understanding who their repeat customers actually are.
Plus, platforms like Talabat or Instagram own the customer relationship. When a customer orders through an aggregator, the merchant fulfils the order but has no way to follow up or bring them back directly. The discovery moment and the loyalty moment are entirely disconnected.
Even merchants who want to build loyalty programmes often do not know where to start. Stamp cards, points systems, cashback, discounts – the options feel unclear, and the expertise to choose between them does not always exist within a small team running a busy operation.
Practical friction compounds the problem. Physical stamp cards get lost. Loyalty tools feel disconnected from the point of sale. Most loyalty programs ask for the phone number after the transaction, on a separate device, or via a QR code the customer is meant to scan and complete later. The capture happens outside the flow the customer is already in.
What our research consistently found is that customers are most open to joining a loyalty programme at the moment of checkout. Still, almost no merchants have loyalty integrated into their payment flow at all. The moment passes, and the opportunity with it.
What SMEs are doing right
What is often missed: UAE SMEs are already doing things that drive repeat visits. They just have not formalised them.
One café attributed roughly 90 per cent of its growth to word of mouth, with no system to track or incentivise referrals. Others manually message regulars on WhatsApp, which is effective but unscalable. Physical stamp cards, despite their limitations, remain widely valued for their simplicity.
The instinct for loyalty is there. What is missing is the infrastructure to make it consistent and measurable.
Compounding this is the absence of a capture moment. When a new customer walks in, there is rarely a structured way to enrol them in anything. Without something as simple as a QR scan at checkout, the opportunity passes the moment they walk out – and most merchants have nothing integrated into their payment flow at all.
The bigger picture
While there are digital loyalty programs options available in the market for UAE SMEs, they are mostly disconnected. The merchant runs the loyalty scanner on a separate phone, while payments run through the POS. Points are awarded in one system, sales in another, and the two never reconcile cleanly, which is why these loyalty programs never work.
What SME merchants need is a solution that connects loyalty and payments together in one solution, where customers don’t download anything and merchants don’t onboard anyone to a new app. The digital card sits in the same wallet they already use, and the merchant gets a direct channel to the customer that doesn’t depend on app installs or Instagram’s algorithm
An integrated solution can help UAE merchants shift from constantly chasing new customers to building stronger long-term relationships with the ones they already have.
By Alexey Pustotin, Product Owner, CRM & Loyalty, Fortis.
