How to configure geolocation push notifications for your wallet pass

A location notification is a message Apple Wallet shows on a contact's lock screen when they're near one of your business profiles with your wallet pass on their iPhone. It's there to put the pass in front of them at the moment they can use it, like "Show your pass at the counter to collect your points".

It only works in Apple Wallet. Google Wallet doesn't support it.

What it's for, and what it isn't

A wallet pass isn't a channel for promotions. Apple designs it as a card that carries information and keeps it up to date, and Wallet uses your locations to bring the pass up when it's useful, the way a gym card appears as you walk into the gym. Keep the text about using the pass at that location, not about an offer or a campaign.

It also can't be aimed at some contacts and not others. Every pass gets the same text for a location, so "You have a free donut waiting" also reaches contacts who don't have one. Leat can't show it based on a contact's points balance or vouchers either.

To tell contacts about a reward, their balance or a promotion, send an email.
To let a contact know their points balance changed, use a field's change message on the pass. See How to configure and design your wallet pass.

Apple explains this in its Human Interface Guidelines for Wallet.

Give the location an address

The notification uses the address of the business profile to know where the location is.

Click the gear icon at the top right of the dashboard to open Settings, then click Business profiles under Management.
Open the business profile and fill in its Address.

A business profile without an address can't trigger a notification. It shows as No address in the list below.

Set the message

Go to Settings, click Contact touchpoints under Communication, find the Loyalty pass card under Wallet Pass and click Edit design. Only admins see Contact touchpoints.
Open the Notifications tab. Under 'Location nearby' notifications, every business profile is listed with its Text and Status.
Click a business profile to open Edit notification for location.
Fill in the Text, the message contacts see, and switch on Is notification active.
Click Update.

The change is saved in your dashboard as soon as you click Update. It doesn't reach the passes your contacts already have straight away. See the next section.

When you add a business profile, its notification is switched on straight away with a standard text. Check it on the Notifications tab and change the text if you want your own.

When a change reaches your contacts' passes

Leat doesn't send a location notification when a contact walks past. The locations and their text are stored inside each contact's pass, and the iPhone shows the notification on its own. So a pass keeps the locations and the text it had when it was last updated on that contact's phone.

That means these changes don't show up on passes your contacts already have:

a new Text for a notification
switching a notification on or off with Is notification active
a new address on a business profile
a new business profile

A contact's pass picks up the change the next time Leat updates that pass. That happens when something changes for that contact, for example when they earn points, redeem a reward, make a prepaid transaction or move to another tier. A contact who hasn't done anything like that since your change still gets the old text, at the old address. There's no button in the dashboard to update every pass at once.

On an iPhone, a pass only receives updates when automatic updates is switched on in the pass's details in Apple Wallet. If it's off, the pass doesn't change at all.

New passes always get the current text and addresses.

Who gets which locations

A pass carries at most 10 locations: the active business profiles with an address that are most relevant to that contact. If you have more than 10 business profiles, a contact won't get a notification near every one of them.

Good to know

You can't send a location notification by hand. It only appears when the contact is near the location.
Contacts can switch these notifications off for your pass in Apple Wallet.
To change what the pass looks like, see How to configure and design your wallet pass.