On the counter
A stand beside the till, where they are already standing and waiting.
Review cards · Cafés & restaurants
Ask while the coffee is still good.
A stand on the counter or a card at the table that sends customers straight to your Google review page — one tap, or one scan of the QR if their phone has no NFC. No app for them, nothing to gate.
For cafés & restaurants
Reviews collected during the wait
While the coffee is good
Ask when they are enjoying it, not by email the following Tuesday.
See it working
Every tap and scan counted, so you know which table earns its keep.
No gating
Everyone goes to Google — no sorting the happy from the not.
The one sector where the card should not be a card
Everywhere else we sell review cards, somebody hands one over. Hospitality is the exception, and it is worth being honest about why. On a busy service nobody remembers to hand anything to anybody. What you have instead — and almost no other trade has — is a customer who is standing still, holding a phone, with ninety seconds to fill while somebody makes their drink. That is the asset. The object that exploits it is a stand on the counter, not a card in a pocket.
So the recommendation for a café is an A5 counter stand as the main object, with cards as the secondary one for table service, takeaway bags and the regulars you actually know. You can design the counter stand yourself in the Design Studio and see it at its real size before anything is printed.
Café, or restaurant? The moment is not the same
A café review is collected during the wait. A restaurant review is collected with the bill, because that is the only moment in a two-hour visit when the table is looking at something you have handed them and the meal is finished enough to have an opinion about. Practically that means a café wants the stand permanently on the counter, and a restaurant wants it to arrive on the bill tray.
Both work. But if you run a restaurant and put the stand by the door, it will collect almost nothing, because people leaving a restaurant are putting coats on.
Tap or scan — and why the QR matters more here
Every one of our stands and cards carries both an NFC chip and a printed QR code pointing at the same place. In hospitality the QR does most of the work, for a reason that has nothing to do with phone models. A stand sits at arm’s length across a counter, and reaching over to touch a phone to it is more of an ask than pointing a camera at it from where you are standing. Tapping comes into its own on a card that somebody is already holding.
Neither route asks the customer to install anything or make an account. More on how the QR side works.
Asking everybody, which is the only version that is allowed
A number of review products ask the customer how their visit was before deciding where to send them — five stars go to Google, anything less goes to a private feedback form that nobody outside the business ever sees. That is review gating. It breaches Google’s own policies, the FTC prohibited it outright in the United States in 2024, and the CMA has been steadily clearer about manipulated reviews in the UK.
We do not do it and will not build it. Every tap and every scan goes to the same Google page. In hospitality this matters more than in most trades, because your customers read reviews more carefully than anybody — a café with forty reviews at 4.6 reads as a real café, and one with two hundred at 5.0 reads as a café that bought them. The honest way to ask for reviews sets out what the rules actually say.
What you get, and what it costs
Review cards and counter stands are quoted rather than bought off the shelf, because they ship already pointed at your Google listing and we would rather set that up than hand you a blank one. Tell us how many counters you are covering and we will come back with a price and a proof of the artwork before anything goes on press. The dashboard, the tap and scan counts, and the ability to repoint the code later are all included, with no subscription attached.
If you also want cards that hand over a person’s own details rather than a review link — for a manager, or for a venue that does events and functions — those are our ordinary contact cards and they have a published price.
The bit that ages well
The card never changes. Where it points does.
This is the difference between a card you own and a card you are stuck with, and it is worth understanding before you buy anybody’s.
A cheap NFC card
The web address is written onto the chip itself. That is why it is cheap, and it works fine — right up until something changes.
- New number? The card still points at the old page.
- To fix it you need every card physically back in your hand.
- Some sellers say “reprogrammable” — that means you re-encode each one yourself with a phone app.
- Lost one? It carries on working for whoever picked it up.
One of ours
The chip carries a permanent code, and we decide what that code opens. The card is a key; the lock is ours to change.
- New number, new role, new company — change it once, in a browser.
- Every card you have ever handed out follows, including the ones you will never see again.
- Point a card at a different profile entirely, whenever you like.
- Lost one? Switch it off from your dashboard and it stops opening anything.
Which is why we can sell you a card and then never charge you again: the thing that keeps it working is not a subscription, it is that the destination was never on the chip. What happens when you change your number goes through all three arrangements in full.
Common questions
Card on the counter or stand on the table — which works better?
A stand, almost always. A card has to be handed over by a person who remembers to do it on a busy service, and a stand asks on its own while somebody waits for their order or their bill. Cards make more sense for table service where the same member of staff closes the visit.
Do customers need an app?
No. They hold their phone near the chip, or point the camera at the printed QR, and your Google review screen opens in their browser. Nothing to install and no account to create, which is why people actually finish.
Can I have one for each table, or each site?
Yes. Each one carries its own code, so the dashboard shows you which table or which branch is producing reviews and which is being ignored. They can all point at the same Google listing, or at different ones if you run more than one site.
Is asking every customer for a review allowed?
Asking everybody is fine. Asking only the people you expect to be positive is not - routing happy customers to Google and unhappy ones to a private form is review gating, which breaches Google’s policies and is squarely in the CMA’s sights in the UK. Our stands and cards send everybody to the same page.
Will it survive a wet counter and a busy service?
The card is the same plastic, bamboo or metal we use for our contact cards, and the counter stand is a printed A5 board with a fold-out strut on the back. Neither has a battery, a screen or anything to charge. If one is damaged or goes missing you disable it from the dashboard and order a replacement carrying the same destination.
What if we rebrand or move the listing?
Change where the code points, from the dashboard, and every stand and card you have already put out follows it. The link is not printed on the object and not written onto the chip, so nothing needs collecting in.
Other trades ask at a different moment — see review cards for trades, where the ask happens on the doorstep at sign-off, and for salons and barbers, where it happens at the chair. A pub is its own case again, because the bar and the tables ask at different moments, and a garage asks at handover. The review cards overview covers all of them.
One thing worth knowing before you order, because it is the step people expect to be harder than it is: the card does not have your review page written into it. You paste your Google review link into your dashboard once, and every review card, sticker and stand you own points there from that moment. Change your listing later and nothing has to be reprinted.