The system has been compared to what is currently available at Starbucks for purchase transactions and loyalty rewards.
Sionic has just announced that its Sionic Ion Rewards app will now allow consumers to be able to make mobile payments for purchases in a way that is comparable to the successful method used by Starbucks.
The massive coffee chain uses its smartphone app and prepaid cards to allow consumers to buy.
The café’s shops receive approximately 3 million mobile payments every week, according to its own statistics. It has predicted that by the end of the year, 10 percent of the transactions that are made in store will occur over smartphones. Sionic is now hoping that its own offering for retail will be at least equally successful.
The mobile payments app is available for both iOS and Android devices.
This mobile payments app will allow consumers to pay using their smartphones at a number of different national retailers. According to the Sionic vice president of product marketing, Bob Burroughs, “We’ve built on the success of Starbucks’ mobile payment and rewards experience by making it even easier for consumers to pay with their phones and earn Ions for shopping and dining at several thousand of their favorite brands’ locations.”
Aside from being able to link a credit or debit card to the mobile payments account, this app has also been designed to provide consumers with reward points called Ion Rewards. The payment is actually made through the generation and scanning of a QR code at the point of sale within the shop. The store would treat the purchase in the same way that it would if a gift card had been used.
Ion merchants are paid in cash out of the Ion bank account. They receive the total checkout amount of the mobile payments transaction, after their fee has been subtracted. The fee is 4.75 percent of the purchase price that has been paid. One percent of that amount is redirected to the consumer in the firm of reward points in order to encourage him or her to continue using the service and shopping at retail stores that accept it.
