Direct Credit: Reward Credit That Spends Like Cash, Inside Your Shop Only

Every other reward model in Gamma decides, in advance, exactly what a customer gets and often exactly when. Direct Credit doesn’t — it grants a spendable balance instead, and leaves the how and when entirely up to the customer. Earned from a purchase, a milestone, or a one-off occasion, the credit shows up in Gamma Wallet and sits there until the customer decides to use it, in whatever amount they choose, on whatever they choose to buy.

Why it’s usually paired with something else

Direct Credit is flexible on the customer’s side and fully contained on the merchant’s — the balance never leaves the shop’s own ecosystem the way a cash refund would. That combination is exactly why it works especially well layered on top of another model: a Community Deposit pool’s payout, for instance, can land as Direct Credit rather than a fixed reward, giving participants the freedom to decide how to spend what they earned.

Where it fits

• A café letting regulars top up a balance once, then pay it down at their own pace across future visits instead of paying per drink each time.
• A restaurant issuing occasion-based gift credit — a birthday, an anniversary — that stays usable over multiple future visits rather than a single sitting.
• A retail shop turning a return or a goodwill gesture into store credit instead of cash leaving the till, while still giving the customer full freedom over what they spend it on.

The two things worth knowing before you turn it on

Expiry is entirely the merchant’s call, set at the moment credit is issued — some shops choose no expiry at all, others tie it to a season or a specific occasion. And because Direct Credit is designed to sit on top of any other model, it’s rarely the only thing a shop runs; it’s usually the layer that turns another program’s reward into something the customer has real control over, rather than a rigid, single-use voucher.

If the goal is control and flexibility for the customer, without ever letting value leak out of the shop as cash, Direct Credit is the model built for exactly that trade-off.