The future of fuel retail: The importance of payment and loyalty
Published on: Sep 11, 2025
Advertorial
DFS explores how seamless payments and well-designed loyalty programs can transform the modern fuel retail experience and strengthen long-term customer relationships.
Across Europe fuel retail is moving in a new direction. Traditional pump-first thinking is giving way to fully integrated, service-led forecourts where convenience, speed, and choice matter as much as the fuel itself.
Consumers are not only arriving to refuel, they are moving through the site with purpose. Today’s consumers are time poor and their need to complete more than one task at a time, as quickly and efficiently as possible, is highly sought after. In today’s retail environment, this level of accessibility is no longer “nice to have”, it’s a necessity.
The consumer of today expects a fuel station to function with the same speed and autonomy as other retail experiences; however, many fuel retailers have little understanding of their customers’ behaviour or journey while on site.
Data and the Connected Customer
Customer data is one of the most powerful tools available to a fuel business. Each customer interaction, and subsequent purchase, is part of a bigger picture – it provides retailers with the insights they need to gain a better understanding of each customer’s buying habits. Not only can this help fuel retailers build an effective sales strategy, but it can also facilitate business growth and help them gain a unique competitive advantage.
The right data can help retailers understand their customer preferences. For example, it can help identify customers’ preferred payment methods (e.g., cash, card, or contactless), the average number of times customers visit their forecourt, or if customers use any additional services while on site (e.g., car wash, coffee shop, parcel pick-up and drop off, etc.). Once this information is available, retailers can start to understand their customers on a whole new level. Thus, enabling them to improve the overall customer journey on site, meet customer needs with appropriate services and facilities, increase sales and profit margins with more targeted promotions, and ultimately become a fuel station motorists want to re-visit.
Precise Payment
When it comes to fuel sites, consumers expect a wide range of payment methods to be available e.g. contactless, chip-and-pin, apple/google wallet, fleet cards, cash, mobile apps etc., and all these payment methods are expected on the forecourt (pay-at-pump) as well as in the c-store (self-checkout kiosk, order kiosk, point-of-sale-system).
Prizma makes on-site and remote control easy and enables retailers to optimise the customer experience, which can ultimately lead to increasing site profits. The ability to remotely drive updates to a single site or to hundreds of sites simultaneously, through Prizma Cloud Services, saves time and ensures sites are always updated with the latest retail items and pricing.
Integrated payment terminals – such as Tokheim Crypto VGA® OPT (Outdoor Payment Terminal) and Crypto VGA® DIT (Dispenser Integrated Terminal) – make payment faster and easier for customers, without staff being required on site. Certified in accordance with the latest PCI approvals, these solutions incorporate a set of robust, anti-fraud mechanisms to ensure payment is constantly secure allowing a fuel station to be successfully unmanned, if required.
With the help of technology, monotonous, time-consuming, and manual tasks are now a thing of the past. In settings like retail and hospitality, consumers are familiar with self-checkout and order kiosks, making fuel site adoption not only practical but expected.
The DFS Self-Checkout Kiosk helps reduce queues, shorten transaction times, and ease staffing pressure during busy periods. It makes the overall customer experience quicker, allowing consumers to continue their day with minimal interruption.
When it comes to made-to-order food and beverage transactions, the DFS Order Kiosk™ powered by FLYX improves flow and provides retailers with upselling opportunities without slowing down the front counter. Sites using the system have seen basket sizes increase by up to 26%. Not only does the DFS Order Kiosk benefit fuel retailers, but it also improves the overall customer experience, as well as helping to reduce queues and waiting times in the c-store.
Long-term Loyalty
In the competitive market of fuel retail, many service stations are implementing the same tactics to ‘win’ and keep customers – making it difficult to stand out from the competition. One of the ways retailers try to differentiate themselves, however, is by delivering added-value services, such as loyalty programs.
A well designed and implemented loyalty program can be a powerful tool for fuel retailers, helping to facilitate customer retention, as well as improving the customer experience, increasing customer spend (as well as c-store margins), and gathering insightful data that can help retailers better understand customer behaviour.
However, a loyalty program on its own is not enough. Fuel retail businesses must earn their customers loyalty and a ‘standard’ loyalty program, although helpful, is not a sure-fire way to generate a long-standing, loyal customer – especially as the average consumer belongs to at least 19 loyalty programs but only 9 are active. Customers expect more, so fuel retailers need to tailor their fuel retail loyalty program to meet evolving expectations.
Prizma has a powerful generic on-line loyalty application, which can provide retailers with a wide range of loyalty functionalities. The application is the same for all companies making use of “loyalty”; however, depending on specific company needs, one or more of the available features can be switched off, or can work a little differently.
DFS facilitates the local loyalty features in Prizma and a host-to-host connection via Tokheim OASE™ (Online Authorisation and Switching Environment) to the central loyalty server or loyalty host. The loyalty host itself is offered and managed by third party companies.
Loyalty doesn’t come from a single promotion or an app download. It comes from consistency: a dispenser that works, payment that’s seamless, signage that makes sense, a self-checkout that doesn't stall, an offer that arrives just when it's relevant. These are all small touchpoints, but together they create a “standard” consumers notice and choose to return to.
Conclusion
Today’s consumers are digitally literate, and their expectations have been shaped by other retail and service providers creating a harmonised and cohesive experience across all channels. As a result, most consumers now expect the businesses they interact with to know their preferences and buying habits. Therefore, fuel stations need to become more than just a place where people refuel.
DFS helps enable that standard across the entire fuel site. Whether it’s through Prizma’s centralised control, reliable and robust Tokheim® and Wayne® fuel dispensers, the flexibility of the DFS Self-Checkout, or the ease of the DFS Order Kiosk, every interaction is designed to strengthen the customer experience and support retail technology loyalty in EMEA.
Fuel retailers don’t need short-term incentives to enhance the customer experience. Consistent service, connected systems, and seamless transactions are what drive long-term engagement, strengthening fuel customer loyalty now and in the future.
Let DFS help you build and retain a loyal customer base, today. Reach out to us for guidance and assistance to help you improve your fuel site offering.
