PayNearMe, an alternative payments product that provides a compelling way for the ‘unbanked’ to use cash payments for online goods, is debuting its first mobile integration today. As you may know, the term “unbanked” refers to consumers who don’t have traditional bank accounts or cannot qualify for credit cards. PayNearMe allows people who don’t have or don’t want to use credit or debit cards to purchase products, pay for bills and more with cash at thousands of 7-Eleven stores in the continental U.S.

Here’s how PayNearMe works. With participating partners, e-commerce or merchant sites, consumers can use the PayNearMe option to pay for purchases or debts owed. You simply place your order with PayNearMe and print out the given receipt. You then take that receipt into a 7-Eleven and they scan it and you pay in cash. Once you pay, your order with the retailer or merchant will be fulfilled.

With the new mobile integration, users can choose to pay with their mobile phones instead of printing out a physical receipt. When paying with PayNearMe, users can now click to use their mobile phone. They will receive a link via text or email with a barcode. When this code is scanned at a 7-Eleven store upon payment, the cashier will authorize the transaction and the payment will be completed. No paper receipts necessary.

Already, Greyhound and Progreso Financiero have been using the mobile payments system and have seen increased traction in the PayNearMe product.

As PayNearMe’s CEO Danny Shader explains to me, as more and more consumers are using smartphones, it makes sense to integrate the payments platform onto mobile platforms. And he points to reports that prepaid smartphones are a fast-growing market commonly used by cash consumers and the unbanked.

It makes sense for PayNearMe, which is now growing by 30 percent each month, to start getting into mobile payments. Printed receipts seem to be in the past, and as more and more consumers (including the ‘unbanked’) look to mobile phones as a wallet, PayNearMe could become a more seamless way to pay for goods, bills, and other services.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It looks like will be a joyful holiday season for many online retailers this year. comScore is reporting that holiday retail e-commerce spending for the first 20 days of the November to December 2011 season is already up 14 percent from the same period last year. Wednesday, November 16 was the heaviest online spending day of the season to date at $688 million.

comScore is forecasting that total online retail spending for the holiday season will reach $37.6 billion, 15 percent increase from last year’s season. For background, the 2010 holiday shopping period saw a 12 percent increase from 2009.

In a recent survey conducted with consumers, holiday shoppers say that retailers’ promotional activity for the early part of the season has increased in relation to last year. Specifically, 33 percent of respondents indicated that they are seeing more discounts, sales and promotions vs. last year compared to just 7 percent who said there were fewer.

Unsurprisingly, one of the major incentives for online purchases is free shipping. When asked how important free shipping is for making an online purchase this holiday season, 76 percent of consumers said that it was important and 47 percent indicated they would abandon a purchase if they got to checkout and found that free shipping was not included. And 40 percent of retail e-commerce purchases in Q3 2011 included free shipping. This is expected to spike in Q4 of 2011.

comScore’s chairman Gian Fulgoni attributes the increase to more consumers looking online for better deals, and the shipping convenience considering the current economic conditions. He adds that there is a shift happening from offline retail to online retail channels for price comparisons and browsing. This could also contribute to more conversions on online retail sites.

And we know mobile shopping will be on the rise as well—we’ll start seeing mobile transaction numbers coming in from retailers and companies like eBay, PayPal following Thanksgiving.

We’ll get a clearer picture of just how strong this holiday shopping season will be, both for brick and mortar and online retailers, following Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. Stay tuned.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Forrester Research has just released a new report this morning projecting U.S. mobile commerce to reach $31 billion by 2016, growing at a 39% compound rate. But the report says that mobile commerce is only expected to be 7% of overall eCommerce sales by 2016 and only 1% of general retail sales.

This year alone, mobile commerce sales are expected to reach $6 billion as more consumers look to their smartphones to make purchases. Forrester says that most retailers are continuing to invest in mobile apps and mobile optimized sites. In a recent survey of major retailers, the firm founds that only 9 percent of online retailers didn’t have a mobile presence or strategy.

Forrester says that there are a number of factors that will help drive growth. First, as mobile security improves, more consumers will feel comfortable inputting financial data into phones. And as smartphones usage increases, more consumers and retailers will look to mobile as an e-commerce platform. Plus as more brick and mortar stores create a web presence (as competition from online retailers heats up), mobile will inevitably be part of this strategy.

To put the $31 billion estimate in perspective, the research firm also recently estimated that both US and European online retail (representing 17 Western European nations) will grow at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate from 2010 to 2015, reaching $279 billion and €134 billion, respectively, in 2015.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

All signs point to this holiday season being a prosperous one for retailers. Hitwise is reporting that searches around Black Friday are up 31%, and the share of visits to Black Friday websites are up 18% from last year during the same time.

Hitwise’s data also shows that more women than men are visiting the Black Friday websites with visits split 59% female and 41% male and visitors to Black Friday sites tend to be younger with 59% of visitors under the age of 35.

In terms of the retailers who are receiving visits from interested consumers, Walmart was top retail site receiving traffic from Black Friday sites for last week. Target was top retail site receiving traffic from Black Friday searches for last week and Walmart takes the top spot for searches this week.

Interestingly, referrals from Facebook.com and Twitter.com to Black Friday sites are up 36% in 2010 vs. 2009, indicating that more consumers and retailers are looking to social media to spread information about deals. In terms of emails about Black Friday deals Hitwise is reporting that email marketing volume is up 23% in 2010 vs. 2009; with Black Friday emails hitting consumer inboxes as early as Oct. 1 of this year.

While we don’t know how profitable Black Friday will be for retailers, an increase in searches and traffic shows that consumers could be pulling out the credit card more often this holiday season. Yesterday, comScore forecasted that online holiday spending would increase by 11 percent to $32.4 billion.

You can check out our Black Friday survival guide here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As more and more consumers turn to Twitter to express their woes about brands and customer service, companies need to keep an eye on the social network to monitor and respond to these conversations and complaints. Help-desk startup Zendesk is ramping up its Twitter integration today, allowing customers to leverage the social interactions on Twitter within their customer service platform.

Zendesk essentially offers a Web-based help desk online ticketing system for customer support. The new integration enables users to turn a Tweet into a Zendesk ticket. You can also respond publicly to a complaint on Twitter from Zendesk’s platform. So you can record any Twitter conversation that is taking place within Zendesk’s platform and also move the conversation from Twitter to an email.

The platform features integration with social media monitoring tools such as HootSuite, TweetDeck, Twitter.com, and the Twitter iPhone and Android apps. The new feature makes sense, considering that Twitter has now become a centralized place for consumer conversations about brands and companies. Of course other help-desk platforms, such as Salesforce’s Service Cloud also features Twitter integration.

Zendesk, which just crossed the 5,000 customer mark, recently raised its pricing, which elicited strong complaints from clients. Zendesk responded to the backlash by reverting to the previous pricing model.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch