Leave The Credit Card, Take The Cell Phone
by Gene Marks, 02.09.10 - Forbes.com
New mobile payment services bring huge benefits to small businesses and their customers.
Small business owners, listen up: Rachel Wallace, marketing director at Wallace Oil in La Junta, Colo., has a new "big box" killer. (Thought that would get your attention.)
Wallace Oil owns and leases six gas stations and a convenience store, and Wallace is always looking for ways to land new customers and keep her existing ones coming back. Last spring The State Bank of La Junta showed her a demonstration of a new mobile payment service powered by Bling Nation. "I signed up after two minutes," says Wallace, who is also president of the local Chamber of Commerce.She has company: About 80 merchants now use Bling in the La Junta area, she adds. That's pretty good penetration for the most populous city of Otero County (pop: 7,568).
Bling Nation's service involves two pieces of hardware: a postage-stamp-size microchip that sticks to the back of any cell phone and a point-of-purchase scanner (much like a credit card machine). State Bank hands out the chip for free to its customers and sells the readers to merchants. All a customer has to do is wave a cell phone past the reader and the transaction is instantly recorded. (more)
New mobile payment services bring huge benefits to small businesses and their customers.
Small business owners, listen up: Rachel Wallace, marketing director at Wallace Oil in La Junta, Colo., has a new "big box" killer. (Thought that would get your attention.)
Wallace Oil owns and leases six gas stations and a convenience store, and Wallace is always looking for ways to land new customers and keep her existing ones coming back. Last spring The State Bank of La Junta showed her a demonstration of a new mobile payment service powered by Bling Nation. "I signed up after two minutes," says Wallace, who is also president of the local Chamber of Commerce.She has company: About 80 merchants now use Bling in the La Junta area, she adds. That's pretty good penetration for the most populous city of Otero County (pop: 7,568).
Bling Nation's service involves two pieces of hardware: a postage-stamp-size microchip that sticks to the back of any cell phone and a point-of-purchase scanner (much like a credit card machine). State Bank hands out the chip for free to its customers and sells the readers to merchants. All a customer has to do is wave a cell phone past the reader and the transaction is instantly recorded. (more)
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