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How members join

In short

A member can enter the club through four routes: the registration form they fill in themselves, a quick registration from the POS (the cashier types only a phone number — the member completes the rest later from a link), a full registration from another channel (self-order QR, online ordering — every field collected up front), or an import. Every member carries a registration source that says which route and which system they came from. The quick route is the one that surprises people: those members legitimately arrive with no name and no consents, and the platform chases the missing data for you.

What every member needs, eventually​

Whatever the route, a complete member is two things:

  • An identity handle — a phone number, or an email address. One of the two is enough to create the member; it is what the platform identifies them by and sends to.
  • The mandatory fields of your registration form — typically name, terms of use, and GDPR consent.

The routes below differ only in when the second part is collected: all at once, or later.

note

Marketing communication consents (SMS, email, push) can never be made mandatory — GDPR requires them to be a free choice. A member can be complete and still have every marketing consent unticked, and campaigns will skip them until they opt in.

Route 1 — The registration form​

The member fills in your public registration form themselves — from the loyalty web app, a QR code, a link in a campaign. Every field you marked as required is collected before the member exists. Nothing is pending afterwards.

Route 2 — Quick registration from the POS​

The fastest way to sign someone up at the till, and the reason it exists: at a busy counter, nobody is going to type a full form.

  1. The customer says yes to joining the club.
  2. The cashier asks for a phone number (or, less commonly, an email address) and enters it in the POS.
  3. The POS sends it to the platform, and the member is created immediately — with nothing but that phone number.
  4. The platform sends the member an SMS or email asking them to finish, using the template you configured under Legals. The message carries a link to your registration form.
  5. The member taps the link, fills in the mandatory fields, and is complete.

Until they do, they stay in the incomplete state — and every time they open the loyalty web app they are redirected back to the form. Nothing is lost in the meantime: they earn on their purchases from the first ticket.

What an incomplete member looks like​

Phone number only, no name, no email, no birthday, every consent box unticked — while the activity timeline already shows purchases, points, and the completion message that went out.

A member profile a few minutes after a quick registration from the POS. The Details panel shows only a phone number; Email and Birthday are empty dashes. All five Consents checkboxes — SMS, Email, T&C, GDPR, Push — are unticked. The Tags panel is empty. The activity timeline on the right already shows, newest first: points received, a total-spent update, a purchase of €7.90, a membership details update, a "Marketing SMS send!" communication event, and at the bottom "Joined the program from MemberAction".

This is expected, not a data problem. A club running quick registration will always have a population of members sitting between step 3 and step 5.

Route 3 — Full registration from another channel​

The same connection the POS uses can carry the whole form, not just a phone number. Wherever a customer can be shown a proper registration screen — a self-order QR menu, an online ordering site, a kiosk, the partner's own app — that channel can collect every field, consents included, and send them all at once.

Members arriving this way are complete from the first second: no pending fields, no completion message, no redirect when they open the web app.

Which of the two routes a channel uses is decided by whoever built the integration, per channel. A single club very often has both: quick registration at the till, full registration on the QR menu.

For your integrator — where the technical detail lives

Both routes are the same registration call, with a different amount of data in it. The field list, the consent flags, and the registration-source fields are documented for developers in the developer documentation. Nothing on this page needs to be configured by hand — it is your POS or ordering partner who chooses which fields to send.

Route 4 — Import​

A one-off or periodic bulk load from a file, for members you already had before the club started. See Import members.

Where a member's route is recorded​

Two places on the member profile:

  • The activity timeline — the oldest entry on every member is how they joined, e.g. Joined the program from MemberAction.
  • The Edit modal — Registration source name (the name of the system that sent the registration — your POS, your ordering channel) and Registration source type (e.g. App). Both are read-only.

The "View and edit member details" modal open over a member profile. Below the identity fields and the Consents checkboxes there is a Registration source section with two read-only fields: Registration source name showing the name of the POS that sent the registration, and Registration source type showing "App".

This is the answer to "where did these members come from?" — and, when a batch of members shows up with nothing but a phone number, the answer to "why do they look empty?"

What to configure for the quick route​

One card, on the Legals page: Member consent settings.

The Legals page. On the right, the Member consent settings card with an Active toggle switched on, a "How to send" dropdown set to SMS, and a Communication template dropdown set to "Sólo te queda un paso más para disfrutar de las ventajas del club". On the left, the URLs card with Terms of use and GDPR fields, and below it the Data deletion requests card.

  • Active — on, or nothing is sent and quick-registered members stay incomplete forever.
  • How to send — the channel used to chase the member: SMS or email. SMS is the usual choice, because on the quick route a phone number is normally all you have.
  • Communication template — the message itself, picked from your communication templates.

The template has one hard requirement: it must contain the Consent request link, inserted from Select magic links in the template editor. That magic link is what carries the member to their own registration form. A template without it sends a message the member cannot act on.

An SMS template editor. The name field reads "Sólo te queda un paso más para disfrutar de las ventajas del club". The SMS content reads "Gracias por unirte a Business: name. ¡Estás a un paso de completar tu membresía! Consent request link", with the business-name field and the Consent request link shown as inserted magic-link chips. A "Select magic links" button sits at the top right.

Gotchas​

5 things that come up with quick registration
  • Empty-looking members are the flow working, not failing. Phone number, no name, no consents — that is exactly what step 3 produces. Check the registration source before treating it as a data-quality incident.
  • No consents means no marketing sends. Until the member completes the form, campaigns skip them at delivery. They still earn and still show up in reports — they just do not receive.
  • The completion message goes out once, on registration. If the number was mistyped, nobody receives anything and the member sits incomplete. The cashier re-checking the number at the till is the only real fix.
  • A template without the Consent request link is a dead end. The member gets a friendly message and no way to act on it. Insert the link from Select magic links, not by pasting a URL.
  • Making a field required affects the incomplete population too. Add a required field to the registration form and the members still waiting at step 4 will be asked for it as well, since they complete against the form as it is when they open it.