Our payment gateway, NMI, provides what it calls "credit card hashes", which are unique identifiers for credit cards. This allows us to seamlessly recognize credit cards across sales channels and track customer loyalty spend without any extra effort from your customers. You don't have to ask your customers to scan a QR code, enter a phone number, or anything else - all they have to do is pay with a credit card associated with their account.
There are various ways that customers can pay with credit cards on the Open Tender platform, including:
Entering a credit card manually when ordering online (which they can then save to their account for easy reordering).
Swiping a credit card at the POS via a non-EMV payment terminal.
Inserting or tapping a credit card at the POS via an EMV payment terminal.
Paying with Google Pay when ordering online or paying at the POS.
Paying with Apple Pay when ordering online or paying at the POS.
In the first 4 cases, the credit card hashes will always be the same. That is, regardless of whether the customer enters their card manually, swipes their card at the POS, inserts their card at the POS, or pays with Google Pay either online or at the POS, the credit card hash will always be the same.
Apple Pay works a little differently. Saving a card in your Apple Wallet results in a different credit card hash for each card on each device. That is, if I add a credit card to Apple Wallet on my iPhone and then pay with this card either online or at the POS via Apple Pay, the credit card hash will be different than if I had used it via one of methods 1-4 outlined above.
This is somewhat annoying, but it's an inherent property of Apple Pay - they effectively create a new credit card each time you add a credit card to Apple Wallet on a new device. This means that if you add a credit card to Apple Wallet on your phone and then add the same card to Apple Wallet on your computer, they will be treated as different credit cards and therefore have different credit card hashes.
The good news is that the credit card hash will be the same regardless of where the customer places their order, as long as they use the same Apple device. That is, as long as I'm using Apple Wallet on my iPhone, it doesn't matter whether I'm ordering from your website (in a web browser on my phone), from your mobile app, or at the POS - the credit card hash will be the same in all three cases.
So the solution for recognizing Apple Pay customers at the POS is for your customers to use their mobile devices to associate a credit card with their account either on your mobile website or in your mobile app (we make it really easy to do this). They can then be easily recognized when paying with that card wherever they choose to transact (at the POS or otherwise).
If the customer is not an Apple Pay user, then it's even easier. Regardless of how they use their credit card, the credit card hash will be the same, so it's easy for us to recognize them and credit their account with loyalty spend when they place an order.