Tuesday 25 September 2012

Store cards, Coupons, Loyalty cards, all stored on your mobile? Exciting business, simple concepts. 'Gyft' gets going.


  
How many store gift cards do you have in a drawer and never used? In fact, they just go out of date. Most retailers estimate that about 20% are never redeemed, leaving a nice little profit on prepaid cards. Looks like that game is over.....

'Gyft' however, changes all that by allowing you to buy, share and redeem gift cards using your mobile and has just announced Apple "Passbook" integration. Which means buying them (or paying for them) has become much easier. More importantly, so is storing them. How cool is that?

(I blogged about better mobile payments yesterday - so if you're interested, it's the next blog below this one).

Because you can store your gift cards on your phone, it means that you can empty those plastic cards from your drawers and better still, this will warn you as they're about to expire.....Or indeed, to check your balance.They already have about 200 retailers on board but this is a very clever idea that tech was made for. It solves a problem.

Gyft is about bring the plastic card business to mobile by way of an App. 

Mobile is of course, ideal for anything associated with shopping. SnipSnap, a mobile coupon-sharing App and Belly, a loyalty card start-up, are also integrating with Apple's Passbook. SnipSnap for example, allows you to store coupons so when you visit a shop, you can see if you have any coupons for that shop on your phone. You have? use them.

Similarly with Belly, you always have your loyalty card to hand and according to Techcrunch, has been downloaded over 500,000 times. So you're in the store and you always collect your points.



The video above, will show you how to incorporate printed coupons into Passbook. But these are great ideas showing how mobile and apps can solve very simple problems,simply.

The key to them being, the development of mobile payment processing such as "Passbook". And points to Jack Dorsey being in the right place with his 'Square' mobile payments venture.

Again.

3 comments:

  1. Like the post..DO you have idea regarding plastic card printing to share?

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    Replies
    1. i think the point is that mobile will replace plastic cards too. You have brands like 'Square' replacing plastic card payment with mobile. 'Gyft' are replacing plastic gift cards with mobile (as above).

      Therefore the liklihood is that plastic cards will diminish and therefore, the need to print them. It would seem to me anyway.

      Delete
  2. Yup...now a days mobile technology is governing many fields and helpful in performing tasks smoothly.....

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