From coffee to clothing, Hichers gives independent shopkeepers everything they need to design, launch, and grow loyalty programs their customers actually use.
The Hichers app is where shoppers actually live with your loyalty programme — collecting stamps, watching points add up, finding offers near them, redeeming with a single QR scan.
Setting up a loyalty program with Hichers is straightforward and quick. Four steps from sign-up to your first happy customer.
List your shop on Hichers in a few minutes. It's free, easy, and there's no credit card required to get started.
Choose stamps, points, cash back, or combine them. Design a scheme that mirrors your brand and resonates with your customers.
Spread the word. Share your scheme on social, hand out QR codes, or let customers find you in the Hichers community.
Watch as customers engage, earn, and redeem. Strengthen relationships and enjoy the kind of repeat business that compounds.
Hichers is more than a loyalty platform — it's a toolbox built for the independent retailer. Every feature is designed to do one thing: bring customers back.
From the first stamp to the thousandth visit, every loyalty mechanic you'd want — designed, refined, and ready to launch.
Hichers isn't just a platform — it's a network. Shopkeepers learn from each other; shoppers earn extra rewards by sharing the offers they love.
The Shopkeepers community is where independent retailers swap what's working, see anonymised regional data, and benchmark their own footfall.
The Shoppers community is built around sharing. Pass on the offers you love — when someone redeems an offer you shared, you get extra loyalty points.
Three core ways to design loyalty: stamps for the regulars, points for the strategists, a wallet that holds them all. Mix and match — or run them all at once.
The classic stamp card, reborn digital. Customers collect stamps with every visit and unlock rewards — no plastic card to lose, no app fatigue.
Build a points system that rewards customers for spend, frequency, or behaviour. They earn, they redeem, they come back for more.
One wallet for every store a customer loves. Stamps, points, and rewards from dozens of vendors — all in a single, beautifully designed place.
From the first cup poured to the thousandth stamp, see your business through the lens of customer behaviour.
~/engineering · A note from the build
Here's the engineering decision behind that — and why a single architecture choice quietly changed how loyalty feels.
When we started building Hichers, the obvious approach was the one everyone uses. One QR code per merchant. Customer scans it at the till. Visit logged. Done. Simple. Stateless. Easy to implement.
We didn't build it that way. And it wasn't an accident.
The problem is that you lose all customer identity at the point of scan. You know a scan happened. You have no idea who did it. Every loyalty event becomes anonymous — which means your "loyalty data" is really just a footfall counter with extra steps.
In Hichers, every customer who downloads the app receives a dynamically generated QR code tied to their unique identity token. They present their code. The shopkeeper scans it. The scan event carries:
That single scan resolves in under 400ms — scheme lookup, eligibility check, points/stamp calculation, dashboard update — across our multi-tenant API layer. Depending on what the customer bought and their loyalty level, one scan opens up the whole world of possibilities.
The customer is no longer passive. They present themselves. The shopkeeper acknowledges them. That three-second interaction pattern changes the feeling of loyalty from transactional to relational.
Most loyalty platforms don't talk about this. When a shop has one QR code on the counter, there's no way to prevent one customer scanning for another. Loyalty fraud is common and usually invisible. Our model eliminates it structurally — because the identity token is bound to the customer's authenticated session.
The most important technical decisions aren't the hardest ones to implement. They're the ones that correctly identify what the system is actually for. This one was for the customer, not the counter. We care on both sides of the machine.
// QR code is illustrative — actual codes are signed, single-session, customer-bound
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Run targeted offers and exclusive discounts.
Digital stamp cards your customers won't lose.
Reward customers with money back on every spend.
Everything Hichers offers, in one plan.
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Useful articles, field notes, and updates from the world of Hichers — for shopkeepers and shoppers alike.
Find out how to successfully roll out your brand-new loyalty program, from launch-day messaging to the slow-burn referral mechanics that compound over months.
View post →Discover the importance of customer retention and how loyalty programs can shift the unit economics of an independent shop in a single quarter.
View post →Need help designing your reward scheme? This guide covers everything you need to know — from picking the right mechanic to setting redemption thresholds.
View post →Eleven months of excuses, and the corner shop that ended them.
I sat on the idea for 11 months.
Convinced myself the market was too niche. The tech too complex. The timing wrong. That someone bigger would do it better.
Then one evening I walked into my local corner shop — a place I'd been going to for years — and there was a closing-down sign in the window.
I asked the owner what happened.
People stopped coming back. I couldn't figure out why.— the corner shop owner, the evening I stopped making excuses
He had no data. No loyalty system. No way of knowing which customers he was losing, or why. He was running his business completely blind.
That's when I stopped making excuses.
Independent shopkeepers work harder than almost anyone I know. They deserve better tools. So I built them.
Hichers is what came out of that evening. A loyalty platform built specifically for independent retail — because they've been overlooked for too long.
If you're a shopkeeper reading this: this was built for you.
Margaret runs a Camden gift shop her family has owned for forty years. No app. No CRM. Just decades of remembering.
I visited her shop as part of early research for Hichers. I expected to ask her about loyalty programmes, technology, maybe some data.
Instead, she showed me a wall.
It was covered in handwritten notes. Birthday cards from customers. A photo of a little girl — "she's 23 now," Margaret told me, "her mum brought her in as a baby."
No app. No points system. No CRM. Just genuine relationships built over decades.
I asked her what kept people coming back.
I remember them. Not their account number. Them.— Margaret, Camden gift shop, 40 years in business
That conversation shaped everything about how we built Hichers. Technology should help shopkeepers do more of what Margaret does naturally — remember people, recognise them, reward them.
Not replace it.
I think about Margaret every time we ship a new feature.
What relationship are we making easier to build?
Community isn't something you build. It's something that already exists — in the florist who keeps back your favourite stems, the bakery that saves you a Saturday loaf, the newsagent who knows your name before you've said it.From "I used to think community was a marketing word"
A number that stops me cold every time I say it. And a fight that shouldn't have to be this uneven.
Behind each closure is a person who woke up at 5am, worked until 9pm, built something from nothing — and then had to put a sign in the window.
This isn't a slow decline. It's a structural failure.
Big chains have loyalty apps, CRM systems, and data teams. They know exactly who their customers are, what they buy, and when they're about to leave.
Independent shopkeepers? Most are flying completely blind. They're just sitting there, hoping physical footfall will save them. Competing against billion-pound operations with the same tools they had 30 years ago.
That's not a fair fight. And it shouldn't be acceptable.
The independent retail sector employs hundreds of thousands of people. It defines the character of every high street, market town, and neighbourhood in this country.— the case for why this matters
When these shops close, something irreplaceable goes with them.
I built Hichers because I believe technology should exist to protect things worth protecting.
The big chains will be fine. It's the independent shopkeeper who needs a champion.
Not because of the product. Because of what the product meant to her.
She'd been running her florist for 19 years. Survived two recessions. A pandemic. Three landlord rent increases.
She told me she'd spent the last year feeling invisible.
"The big supermarkets have flowers now," she said. "Cheaper than mine. People walk past without even looking."
She'd signed up for Hichers mostly out of desperation.
Six weeks later, she called me. Her regulars were coming back more often. One had sent three friends in after redeeming a shared offer. Her busiest Saturday in two years had just happened.
It's not just the numbers. I feel like someone's on my side.— a florist in Bristol, six weeks in
That's the moment I knew.
Not when we hit a user milestone. Not when we got a positive press mention.
When a florist in Bristol felt like someone was on her side.
That's why we built this. That's the only metric I actually care about.
Six shorter pieces
"Why did it take this long for something like this to exist?" — a five-location café owner, ninety seconds into a demo. Three weeks later she messaged: customers were finding the brand through Hichers and visiting locations they'd never known existed.
Read on LinkedIn →A friend in Canada messaged me during the Cricket World Cup semi-final. I typed a reply between overs. Four days later her boss emailed asking for a meeting. We're now in active discussions about a white-labelled Hichers across 390 locations.
Read on LinkedIn →Your local butcher knows your name. That's the entire gap. Independent shopkeepers aren't less talented — they're making decisions with no information. We're not closing the gap between independent and chain retail. We're removing it.
Read on LinkedIn →Every shopkeeper knew their regulars by name — what they liked, when they came in, what they'd mentioned last time. Extraordinary, human-level data — stored entirely in their heads. And zero of it was captured anywhere.
Read on LinkedIn →V1 had 14 features. Shopkeepers used 2. We stripped the product back ruthlessly — removed 9 features in a single week. Adoption went up. Then a message I now keep above my desk: "It's the first app I've set up without needing to call my son."
Read on LinkedIn →Talk to shopkeepers before writing any code. Find one shop and go deep, not ten and go shallow. Ship embarrassingly early — the version that embarrassed me turned out to be the version shopkeepers actually understood.
Read on LinkedIn →You won't see this post because you're too busy. That's kind of the point.
While most of us are having a relaxed Saturday — you're restocking shelves, handling a delivery that came late, dealing with a card machine that's playing up, and smiling at every customer who walks through the door.
Nobody writes articles about this. Nobody makes documentaries. Nobody posts LinkedIn carousels celebrating it.
But I've spent the last two years in and out of your shops, and I want to say something clearly:
What you do is extraordinary.
You create the places where people feel known. Where they belong. Where a Saturday morning feels like community rather than transaction.
You're not just running a business. You're holding a neighbourhood together.
I built Hichers for you. Not for a pitch deck. Not for an investor deck. For you.
And if there's a shopkeeper in your life — family, friend, neighbour — share this with them today. Tell them someone's on their side.
Get started with Hichers today and create a loyalty program that actually works. No obligations. No credit card required.