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Love your local vending machine and it’ll love you back. That’s the message from USA Technologies Inc. (USAT), operator of a wireless network of card-accepting vending machines. USAT this week unveiled a loyalty program called “More” centered around a proprietary, reloadable stored-value card that machine owners and operators can offer consumers.
When used at a More-connected machine, the prepaid card enables the holder to earn cash rewards or discounts on future purchases. The idea is to drive repeat customer traffic to specific machines by applying some of the data-based loyalty practices now common at brick-and-mortar stores and in e-commerce, but rare in the vending world.
“Retailers have been able to get really smart about knowing their customers,” Maeve McKenna Duska, Malvern, Pa.-based USAT’s vice president of marketing, tells Digital Transactions News. “In our industry that we serve, it\'s not been possible. That consumer really has no relationship with the owner or operator of that machine.”
USAT hopes to create such relationships with the More program, which already is being used by an undisclosed handful of its 5,000 machine-owning customers ahead of a wider rollout. In addition to the prepaid card, which USAT manages itself, the program includes a Web site, getmore.usatech.com, where consumers can enroll and manage their accounts, and an app for mobile devices. Once enrolled, consumers can receive e-mail notices of promotions offered by the operator.
USA Technologies runs the back-office operations and handles customer service, in addition to supplying generic or customized marketing materials branded with the machine owner’s logo.
Vending-machine owners can get prepaid cards into the hands of consumers in several ways, including leaving blank ones at machines. In the case of a large office building that may have a number of vending machines, cards could be distributed through a company’s human-resources department or other designated administrator, Duska says.
Once a consumer has a card, he or she can load and reload it by linking a major credit or debit card to a More account via the getmore Web site. When the card is swiped at a participating machine, USAT’s system uses the card number to determine whether the holder is eligible to earn or redeem rewards at that particular machine. The Web site will identify for each enrolled consumer only those vending machines where his or her card can earn a reward.
Vending machine owners pay an enrollment fee, which USAT wouldn’t disclose, as well as a monthly fee in the range of “a couple of dollars” per machine depending on various factors, Duska says. Consumers pay no fees.
Each machine owner or operator determines the parameters of its More loyalty program and funds the rewards, according to Duska. Some, for example, are interested in generating traffic during traditionally slow times and could do so by offering discounts or other rewards during such periods, she says.
In addition to driving more traffic to the vending machines of its corporate customers, USAT sees the program as another way to leverage its ePort Connect network, which currently has 196,000 self-service connection points that offer card acceptance. According to Duska, the network has plenty of unexploited potential since the company’s customers operate more than 2 million machines in all. Duska says not every machine owner will want to participate, but adds, “We’re very hopeful that we would get the bulk of our vending customers to deploy it … our customers have been asking for it.”
Prepaid card market researcher Ben Jackson, a senior analyst at Maynard, Mass.-based Mercator Advisory Group Inc., says the More program could be successful if the card is simple to use and if USA Technologies is able to enroll vending machines in high-traffic locations, including corporate or college campuses, transit stations, and gyms. “If the card holds value that can be easily earned, loaded, and/or redeemed by frequent vending- machine users, then I can see where it might have value in some contexts,” Jackson tells Digital Transactions News.
