At some point, most retailers with serious ambitions around strengthening their customer relationships and driving long-term growth face the same question: should we build our own loyalty programme, or buy one?
On the surface, it could feel like a straightforward decision. Building promises control, flexibility, and ownership. Buying offers speed, proven capabilities, and less dependency on internal resources.
But that framing is misleading. The real challenge is not choosing between two technical approaches. It is understanding what you are actually building.
Many organisations begin by treating loyalty like any other software project. A defined scope, a roadmap, and a team tasked with building the required functionality.
That approach makes sense, until it doesn't. A modern loyalty programme cuts across marketing, pricing, data, customer service, partnerships, and increasingly retail media. It connects campaign orchestration, personalisation, promotions, and customer insights. It is not a standalone system. It sits across the entire organisation.
This is where things start to break down. When loyalty is built as a technical solution but operates as a cross-functional capability, misalignment follows. Marketing pushes for agility. IT prioritises stability. Data teams want control. Commercial teams want speed.
The result is rarely a cohesive platform. It is a collection of compromises, and the tech team often ends up building something that don’t fit the actual need, resulting in way bigger cost, wasted resources, and in need of buying something that is ready anyway.
Most build vs. buy conversations focus on visible costs: development hours, infrastructure, and licensing. But the real cost shows up elsewhere.
A recent global survey by Exclaimer, based on more than 2,000 IT and security leaders, found that fewer than 30 percent of internal software projects are completed on time and within budget. Many are delayed; a significant number is abandoned.
Even when projects are delivered, they often cost far more than expected. Nearly half exceed their original estimates by a wide margin. Nearly half exceed their original estimates by a wide margin.
And then comes the part rarely accounted for upfront: maintenance. Internal systems require continuous updates, integrations, security work, and support, often hundreds of hours a month, while teams juggle other priorities.
Loyalty programmes make this even more complex. They are not static. They evolve with customer expectations, regulatory changes, and commercial strategy. What starts as a build project becomes a permanent operational responsibility.
Building a loyalty programme is not just about getting something live. It is about maintaining and evolving it over time. New mechanics, new channels, and new data requirements all add layers of complexity. Capabilities like AI-driven segmentation, real-time orchestration, partner integrations, and omnichannel consistency require continuous investment and coordination.
Over time, the organisation is not just running a loyalty programme. It is running a platform.
In retail, timing is critical. Campaigns need to launch quickly. Personalisation needs to adapt continuously. New concepts like gamification or retail media need to be tested and scaled without long lead times.
Buying changes the equation. Instead of spending months or years building foundational capabilities, retailers can start activating use cases almost immediately, gaining access to specialised expertise and proven solutions designed to handle complexity.
Every hour spent building internal systems is an hour not spent improving the customer experience. Differentiation rarely comes from owning the infrastructure behind loyalty. It comes from how effectively it is used.
One of the strongest arguments for building is creating a solution that fits perfectly from day one. In reality, that perfect fit does not last. Requirements change, expectations evolve, and new channels emerge. What felt right at the start can quickly become limiting.
Research from AgileSoftLabs, based on more than 100 build vs. buy evaluations, suggests that as many as 70 percent of custom software projects would have been better served by buying. Not because building is wrong, but because organisations consistently underestimate how quickly complexity grows.
There are cases where building is the right decision. When loyalty is deeply embedded in the core business model and depends on highly unique mechanics that no existing platform can support. But those situations are less common than many assume.
Most organisations believe their requirements are unique. In practice, the underlying needs are often shared across the industry. For most retailers, loyalty is a critical capability, but not a unique one. The real differentiation lies in strategy, execution, and understanding customers.
The conversation is shifting. It is no longer about whether an organisation can build a loyalty platform. The better question is whether they should.
Buying is not about giving up control. It is about focusing on what matters. Instead of aligning internal silos, they can orchestrate journeys across them. Instead of maintaining systems, they can continuously improve them, and continuously improve systems instead of merely maintaining them.
Loyalty is not won by the company that writes the most code. It is won by the company that moves fastest, learns quickest, and stays closest to its customers.
