---
title: "Shopper loyalty"
description: "Recognize customers and turn their payment card into a loyalty card."
url: "https://docs.adyen.com/unified-commerce/loyalty-program"
source_url: "https://docs.adyen.com/unified-commerce/loyalty-program.md"
canonical: "https://docs.adyen.com/unified-commerce/loyalty-program"
last_modified: "2021-07-06T11:56:00+02:00"
language: "en"
---

# Shopper loyalty

Recognize customers and turn their payment card into a loyalty card.

[View source](/unified-commerce/loyalty-program.md)

To engage shoppers and promote shopper loyalty, you can set up a system where you use payment data to recognize a shopper, and then offer tailored benefits. For example:

* *Payment-linked loyalty*, where your loyalty program is tied to [identifiers that you receive in API responses](/unified-commerce/collect-data#overview-of-identifiers) from our payments platform. Using these identifiers, you look up the shopper in your loyalty program and decide on the discount or loyalty reward to offer.

* *Product recommendations* based on the purchase history of the shopper. Here too, your back-end system uses identifiers from the API response to look up the shopper's past purchases.

You can use the card alias to recognize the shopper's card, but you can also go one step further and create your own identifiers to be returned in our API responses. That enables you to recognize an individual, not just their payment card, and make the shopping experience even more personal.

## Requirements

To engage shoppers in loyalty use cases, you must have a back-end system to store **customer profiles** of your shoppers, containing card and shopper identifiers together with any other details that your use case requires, such as purchase data.

Also, because you collect personal details, you need to consider [data privacy](#data-privacy).

## Data privacy

Before storing any customer data, including payment data, you need to consider data privacy.

* Consult your legal department or an accredited third-party company to understand the data privacy regulations of the countries/regions that you operate in.
* Ask for your customer's explicit permission to store their data, and be clear about what you intend to use it for. For this, you could use the Terms and Conditions on your website, or you can [use the payment terminal to interact with the customer](/unified-commerce/terminal-interaction).

If the customer asks to remove their information, you can use our [Data Protection API](/development-resources/data-protection-api) to remove any customer-related data that you have stored with Adyen. The API also enables you to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [right to erasure](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/).

## Next steps

[required](/unified-commerce/loyalty-program/create-profiles)

[Create customer profiles](/unified-commerce/loyalty-program/create-profiles)

[Create a profile for your customers.](/unified-commerce/loyalty-program/create-profiles)

[required](/unified-commerce/loyalty-program/recognize-customers)

[Recognize customers](/unified-commerce/loyalty-program/recognize-customers)

[Identify returning customers when they make an online or in-person purchase.](/unified-commerce/loyalty-program/recognize-customers)
