RESOURCES
What is ShopKick?
Shannon Andrade
May 16, 2013
ShopKick, a mobile shopping app, was originally launched in August 2010. With its simple mission ‘to make shopping better’ the mobile app reached over one million consumer users in the first six months initially offering incentives or ‘kicks’ and scanned products when users visited one of five retailers/brands that were part of the initial launch: Macy’s, Best Buy, Sports Authority, American Eagle Outfitters and Simon Property Group. In October 2012, the company launched a significant redesign to the app, offering consumers more opportunities to earn ‘kicks’ and delivering two major new features – digital catalogues, or lookbooks, and saved product lists, which together fueled skyrocketing usage both from new users as well as a vast group of early adopters. The primary concept behind the...
What is Bitcoin?
Shannon Andrade
April 24, 2013
Bitcoin is an open source person-to-person (P2P) digital currency that enables instant transactions and worldwide reach all without financial intermediaries and with zero or low processing fees. One of the first implementations of the ‘crypto-currency concepts’, the self-proclaimed ‘first global neutral currency’ has garnered a lot of media attention over the past few weeks, primarily due to the currency’s three-fold rise – and then fall – in value. With Bitcoin individuals buy ‘bitcoins’ with cash and then use them to trade/buy goods online or transfer funds to others. To get started individuals simply choose a Bitcoin wallet and then establish their Bitcoin address (similar to a physical address or email), which serves as their unique identifier for their digital currency transactions...
What is Punchey?
Shannon Andrade
April 15, 2013
Boston based Punchey is a self-described end-to-end payments platform designed specifically for small and mid-sized businesses. Founded by Nathaniel Stevens, who also founded online marketing and advertising technology platform, Yodle, Punchey was introduced via a ‘soft-launch’ in mid-2011. In August 2012, the company formally launched its comprehensive yet simple platform. Attracting businesses based on low processing rates (2.75 percent) and no long-term contracts, Punchey offers three key business services through Transaction BoostÔ: media, payments and live. The media, or advertising, services include search engine optimization (SEO) through Yahoo and Bing, Google Ad Words, and sponsored ads. The company’s payments services include seamless, price fixed interchange and credit/debit...
What is Lemon Wallet?
Shannon Andrade
April 9, 2013
Lemon was originally launched in July 2011 as a money management application, allowing consumers to turn their paper receipts into digital data through a smartphone camera. The customer-focused application was an immediate hit, attracting over one million users in its first four months of release. In June 2012, with approximately 1.5 million users, the company introduced the Lemon ‘Smarter’ Wallet with a variety of new features and benefits including the ability to ‘back-up’ receipts, coupons and tickets as well as payment and ID cards. With the new ‘Smarter’ Wallet, consumers also have the option of making their payment cards interactive, allowing them to check balances and track purchases as well as receive personalized, location-based offers and discounts. Leveraging geo-location...
What is Swipely?
Shannon Andrade
April 2, 2013
Founded in 2009, Swipely is a payment marketing application that transforms the cash register into a marketing tool, designed to support business growth. Launched in five markets (Boston, Providence, New York, Washington D.C., and San Francisco), the Rhode Island based company was recently named to Forbes list of 100 Most Promising American Companies, alongside notable brands such as Popchips, OtterBox, ShareThis, and Livestream. Currently available exclusively in the U.S., Swipely is targeted to merchants processing over $30,000 per month in credit card sales as a value-based extension of their existing point-of-sale system. The application, which features built in loyalty, marketing and analytics, manages processing of traditional payments types (MasterCard, Visa, American Express and...
What Is Dwolla?
Shannon Andrade
March 28, 2013
Dwolla, the Iowa based company founded in 2008 and launched in the U.S. in December 2009, is a cash based network that relies on a bank account based payments. For individuals, Dwolla provides a convenient, paperless and quick way to pay friends or businesses. Using either Dwolla’s website or mobile application, individuals can send money via email, phone (SMS), Facebook, LinkedIn or even Twitter. Payments are easy – no more paper checks, quick – payment is immediate and you’re not waiting for a check to arrive in the email, and cost-effective – Dwolla charges just $.25 for each transaction $10 or over and transactions under $10 are free. For businesses, Dwolla offers significant cost savings by eliminating the physical processing of paper check payments and, if customers switch from...
What is Apple® Passbook®?
Shannon Andrade
March 13, 2013
When Apple launched the iPhone® 5 in mid-2012, media and consumer anticipation was centered on near field communication (NFC). And, while the NFC announcement never came, Apple did announce Passbook as a key new feature available in iOS 6. Questions immediately arose. Is Passbook a digital wallet? Is it Apple’s first step, alongside it’s 435 million plus iTunes® users, into mobile payments? Apple positions Passbook as a single place to keep boarding passes, movie tickets, coupons, loyalty cards, and even other mobile payment applications. Aside from having everything in one ‘wallet’, Passbook leverages geo-location technology to organize these passes according to where you are, or even notify you as to an expiring coupon or gate change for a forthcoming flight. Passbook still...
What is Sendit Social
Shannon Andrade
March 5, 2013
According to Wikipedia, “a gift card is a restricted monetary equivalent or scrip that is issued by retailers or banks to be used as an alternative to a non-monetary gift.” For decades, consumers and merchants relied on paper gift certificates, which, for the majority of retailers, were replaced by more convenient plastic gift cards in the early 90s. Designed to resemble credit cards, branded for the merchant or issuer and available in a variety of denominations when connected to the merchant/issuers payment system, the first plastic gift card was issued by Blockbuster in 1994. For larger ‘big box’ merchants, gift cards are a standard business practice, often making up a significant percentage of their annual sales, especially during the holiday season. From a consumer perspective, many...
What is FreebeePay?
Shannon Andrade
February 18, 2013
Mobile applications are a $6 billion market today and, according to 2012 predictions from industry leading analyst firm, Forrester, that market is expected to grow nearly ten fold to more than $55 billion by 2015. While the world of mobile applications ranges widely from games to productivity to social and much, much more, a growing percentage of mobile ‘apps’ are focused on contactless payments and mCommerce. Freebeepay is one such company. FreebeePay is an award winning solution that enables merchants to easily connect with customers on a personal level by combining mCommerce, social networking, and micro advertising together in one, easy-to-use, yet powerful, mobile application. Freebeepay puts merchants ‘in their customers’ wallets’ and offers the capability to deliver...
What is vPromos?
Shannon Andrade
February 13, 2013
New mobile applications continue to enter the payments marketplace servicing a wide variety of needs for merchants and consumers alike. With dozens of entries flooding the space each month, it’s our goal with, what has now become our ‘What Is’ series, to provide brief overviews of many of the new apps available. There is plenty of research validating the benefits of customer loyalty programs. In fact, studies have shown that a successful rewards program can increase consumer loyalty, frequency, and average spend up to 17 percent or more. But, we all know that for customers to be engaged, they much recognize the value and it has to be easy. Built on the principals of delivering an easy to use mobile application that increases sales by rewarding loyalty, vPromos removes the confusion and...