Employee ID, Gift & Loyalty Card Solutions for Retail

What Retail card programs need

• Employee photo IDs
• Branded gift and loyalty cards
• VIP and membership credentials
• Magnetic stripe or barcode encoding
• Consistent design across locations

Cards that carry your brand

From the name badge at the register to the gift card at the counter, Card Imaging supplies the printers, blank and magnetic-stripe cards, and encoding retail needs, or we print your gift and loyalty cards in bulk. Multiple locations? We help you keep design and reordering consistent across the chain.

Retail card programs are usually two or three separate things that nobody planned together: employee IDs, point of sale swipe cards for tills, and sometimes gift or loyalty cards. They tend to be bought separately, from different suppliers, at different times. Bringing them into one program is generally cheaper and always tidier. For how other sectors approach this, see our overview of card programs by industry.

We supply retailers, restaurants, grocers, convenience chains and hospitality groups across Illinois, and have since 1984.

Point of sale cards, and why they are their own category

Server and manager swipe cards are not employee IDs and should not be treated as such. They authenticate somebody to a till, they get swiped dozens of times a shift, and they are tied to a specific POS system that will not accept anything else.

We stock Micros server and manager cards for Micros and Oracle systems. These work with those systems and are not interchangeable with cards for other POS platforms, which is a distinction worth being clear about before ordering. If you run something else, tell us which system and we will tell you honestly whether we can supply for it.

Because these cards are swiped constantly, the magnetic stripe takes real punishment. High-coercivity stock holds its encoding far better, and everything we stock with a stripe is high-coercivity for that reason. The card and credential range lists what we keep.

Seasonal hiring is the thing that breaks the program

Retail staffing is spiky in a way few other sectors match. A chain that runs steadily most of the year might take on a large temporary intake for the holidays, and every one of those people needs a card before their first shift.

Ordering badges for a seasonal intake through an external supplier does not match the pace at which retail actually hires. People are interviewed and start within days.

Printing in house solves it. It also solves the other half of the problem, which is that a good portion of seasonal staff do not stay, and you would rather not have paid for pre-printed cards for people who worked two shifts.

Make the temporary badge look temporary

A seasonal or probationary badge that is indistinguishable from a permanent one is a small security problem and a bigger practical one. A different color and a printed end date lets a manager see the situation at a glance.

It also matters at offboarding. Retail turnover means cards go out of circulation constantly, and a card that still works after somebody leaves is a genuine risk, particularly where the card authorizes voids or refunds at a till. Collecting the physical card and deactivating the credential should be two separate steps in the process, because relying on one of them is how gaps appear.

Employee ID, and what the customer sees

On a shop floor the badge is customer-facing. A legible first name and the store branding is most of what it needs to do, and a large clear name does more for service than any amount of small print.

Full-color printing on decent stock is worth it here for the same reason a clean uniform is. A scuffed, faded badge on a customer-facing employee reads as a store that has stopped paying attention.

Dual-sided printing gives you space for the things that would otherwise clutter the front: a store number, a returns policy line, an employee number, or a barcode for time and attendance.

One card for the till, the stockroom door, and the clock

Retail sites often have back-of-house access requirements: stockroom, cash office, loading bay, staff entrance. Combining that with the employee ID is straightforward if the technologies line up.

We program HID credentials, covering HID Prox, iCLASS SE and SR, and SEOS, in standard formats including 26-bit H10301 and 37-bit H10304. If your readers take HID credentials we can supply cards already programmed to your facility code and card range, ready to print and issue. That is described on the prox and access card programming page.

Where the same card also needs to work at a till or a time clock, the card may need to carry both a magnetic stripe and a proximity antenna. That is entirely doable, but the printer needs the right encoders and the card needs the right construction, so it is worth settling before you buy either. The access credentials and encoding guide covers the formats plainly.

Gift and loyalty cards

These are a different product with different economics. Volumes are usually high enough that pre-printed stock produced in a run is far cheaper per card than printing them yourself, and the finish is better.

Where in-house printing helps is personalization: a named loyalty card, a tier upgrade printed on the spot, or a replacement issued at the counter. A common arrangement is bulk pre-printed stock for the generic cards and a desk printer for anything that needs a name on it.

If you are running loyalty on a magnetic stripe or a barcode, keep the encoding scheme consistent across stores from the start. Reconciling three different schemes later is painful.

More than one store

Multi-site retail programs drift. Each store solves its own badge problem, and within two years there are several card designs and no consistent standard.

Standardize the card design, the stock and the credential format centrally, then decide separately where the printing happens. Some chains centralise issuance and ship badges to stores. Some put a small printer in each location. A common middle path is regional printing at larger sites covering the smaller ones nearby.

Our printer finder will size a machine for each pattern, the printer buying guide covers the trade-offs, and the full range of ID card printers is there to browse.

Running costs and keeping it working

Ribbons are consumed per card, so a 300-print ribbon covers 300 badges and budgeting is simple arithmetic once you know your hiring rate. Our ribbon and supply range lists yields on everything we carry, which makes a standing order easy to size across several stores.

Clean the printer with every ribbon change. Back offices are dusty and a stockroom printer collects more than an office one does.

We are an authorized service center with a bench in Woodridge, so repairs are done with genuine parts. See printer repair, and drivers and support for the driver issues that account for a good share of what looks like hardware failure.

If you would rather not run equipment, we print and encode cards and ship them finished, which suits a chain-wide rebadge or a new store opening. That is on the card printing service page.