A Loyalty Program for Multiple Locations
The obvious way to picture a loyalty program spreading to a second location is that it either works everywhere automatically, the way a gift card balance does, or it has to be rebuilt from scratch at each address, the way a lease does. Neither is quite right. A multi-location loyalty program is a choice a merchant makes on purpose, and Ruffus supports two different answers to it — not because one is a workaround for the other, but because a coffee shop with three identical locations and a group of barbershops each run more like independent businesses actually want different things from the same feature.
The assumption a paper card can't survive
A paper punch card makes the choice for you, by accident: it lives in one customer's wallet, gets stamped at whichever counter has the physical card, and has no way to know a second location exists. If a regular usually visits the downtown shop but stops at the airport location on a trip, the punches don't follow — not because the business decided punches shouldn't carry over, but because a hole-punched card has no mechanism for carrying anything anywhere. That's the same failure mode covered in the case against paper punch cards generally: the limitation isn't a policy, it's the medium. A digital card removes the constraint, which is exactly why the decision underneath it — should a stamp at one location count at another? — has to become a real, explicit setting instead of an accident of geography.
Unified: one card, any location
In unified mode, which is the default, a customer's card carries one stamp count across every location the merchant runs. Stamp at the downtown shop on Monday, stamp at the mall location on Friday, and it's the same card moving toward the same reward — the customer never re-enrolls, never starts a second card, and never has to remember which location "their" card belongs to, because it doesn't belong to one. This is the natural fit for a business that's really one brand wearing multiple addresses: the same menu, the same offer, the same café experience regardless of which door a customer walks through. The reward math is identical everywhere because it's the same program, not five copies of a similar one that happen to agree today and could quietly drift apart later.
Per-store: separate programs, separate counts
Per-store mode is the other real answer, not a fallback for merchants who haven't set unified mode up properly. Each location runs its own program with its own stamp counter, and a customer's progress at one doesn't carry to another — visiting a second location starts a new card there, the same way visiting an unrelated business would. That's the right fit when locations are more independently run than the unified case assumes: a franchise-style structure where each site sets its own offer, a multi-brand barbershop group where each shop has its own following and its own margins, or simply a merchant who wants to run a promotion at one location without it silently applying everywhere else. Neither mode is the upgrade path from the other — a business picks the one that matches how its locations actually relate to each other, and can run either one.
What's tracked either way
Under the hood, a customer's membership is recorded per customer per location regardless of which mode is active — that record is what makes a merchant's location-level reporting possible in either case. What differs is which reward logic governs the count that record contributes to. In unified mode, every location's membership rolls into the same governing program, so the customer experiences one continuous card. In per-store mode, each location's membership is governed by that location's own program, with no shared threshold connecting them. The distinction is enforced at the program level rather than left as a convention to be careful about, which is what makes it safe for a merchant to switch a location's mode without silently corrupting a customer's progress somewhere else.
What adding a location costs
The choice between modes doesn't change the price of adding a store, which matters because a lot of loyalty tools treat a second location as a second full setup rather than an increment. Ruffus pricing is a flat $49.99/mo CAD for a first store, and $25/mo for each additional one, with no cap on how many a merchant adds — a fifth location costs the same $25/mo as a second. Every store comes with 3 counter stations included (additional stations are $5/mo each) and ships with 2 NFC tap cards and a wooden counter base, so a new location isn't waiting on hardware that has to be requested separately. None of that pricing depends on which mode a merchant runs; a five-location unified café group and a five-location per-store barbershop franchise pay the identical $49.99 + 4×$25.
Choosing deliberately, not defaulting
The mistake worth avoiding isn't picking the "wrong" mode — it's not picking at all, and inheriting unified mode by default when the business actually behaves like five separate ones, or the reverse, setting up five disconnected programs for a brand that customers experience as one shop. The honest question is how a customer would describe the relationship between two of a merchant's locations. If the answer is "it's the same place, just closer to my house," unified mode matches what the customer already believes is true. If the answer involves different owners, different offers, or different reputations location to location, per-store mode says that out loud instead of papering over it with a shared counter that doesn't reflect how the business actually runs. Either way, the setting lives on the merchant's own dashboard alongside the rest of the program's rules, and switching it later doesn't require rebuilding cards that already exist — if it's not obvious which fits, reach out and describe how the locations actually relate.
The short version
Multi-location loyalty isn't automatically shared and isn't automatically separate — it's a setting a merchant picks based on whether their locations are one brand or several. Unified mode gives every location a shared stamp count on the same card; per-store mode gives each location its own counter and its own program. Membership is tracked per location either way, which is what lets a merchant switch modes without breaking anything, and neither choice changes what a new store costs: $49.99/mo CAD for the first, $25/mo for each one after that, uncapped.