#Smartphone knocks out cafe coupon cards

M-Commerce & Payments »

The #smartphone revolution is knocking out café coupon cards in Australia. Read full article here.

Australians use millions of café loyalty cards monthly. And these cards will be extinct in time to come.

Patrick Schilling, a stock broker by occupation, designed the Wealie iPhone app as a replacement for some of the estimated 18 to 20 million loyalty cards that get printed, stamped, punctured and discarded each year.

The whole concept revolves around using Quick Response (QR) codes to tally purchases so that when a specific number is reached the customer is rewarded with a freebie.

This idea came from his friend who had 15 loyalty cards. Schilling estimates that half of Australia’s 15,000 restaurants and cafes use some sort of loyalty card and that, on average, each venue prints and distributes about 2500 cards a year. Merchants using the apps are seeing increased profits besides doing their part for the environment.

The app is free for customers but costs between $10 and $20 a month for retailers to use.

The Wealie iPhone app joins another, The Specials Board, made by Jon Williams.

The Special Board used by about 400 merchants in both Sydney and Melbourne, makes use of a smartphone’s GPS location to find and redeem the latest offers, promotions and deals from hospitality venues. His app had generated more than 10,000 reward redemptions for customers to date, he said.

Both Nokia and Microsoft approached Williams late last year. Both have financed development of his app and are using The Specials Board to showcase the app capabilities of their new mobile platforms. To use The Specials Board customers pay nothing while merchants pay $675 a year to be listed.

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