Girl Scout mobile commerce quadruples sales of cookies this year

Girl Scout Mobile Commerce

Girl Scout Mobile Payments

Smartphone credit card swipers encourage people to buy.

The Girl Scouts have now released their mobile commerce results after having sold cookies using this technology for the first time, and the outcome was exceptionally promising.

Four times more cookies were sold with smartphone sales than a year ago without the tech.

Thirty councils of Girl Scouts – representing over 40,000 troops – announced earlier in 2012 that they had entered into a partnership with Sage Mobile Payments, which provided the children with the ability to sell their cookies using smartphones to complete transactions from credit and debit cards. All it required was the attachment of a small device to the smartphone.

The kids headed out, armed with their traditional favorites, such as Thin Mints and Tagalongs.

But this year, they weren’t just raising money through cash, which has proven to be challenging over the last few years as consumers have less cash on them now that they are highly reliant on plastic. Instead, the Girl Scouts had mobile commerce on their side, to cater to spontaneous purchases even when the individual doesn’t have cash on hand.

According to the Sage Payment Solutions president, Greg Hammermaster, “Fundamentally, accepting credit and debit cards generates more spontaneous purchases.” He pointed out that consumers not only prefer to make their purchases using their credit cards, but they also have a tendency to be willing to purchase more when they are using them as opposed to checks or cash.
He explained that “By promoting credit cards at the point-of-sale, it increases the spontaneous nature that everyone feels when passing a Girl Scout cookie table.”

The Sage swiper is a small gizmo that attaches to a smartphone to transform it into a mobile commerce device. It looks quite simple, but it enabled the Girl Scouts to turn their folding tables and door to door wagons into a full scale checkout counter where credit and debit payments could all be processed. As such a large number of the councils reported notable sales increases as a direct result of this technology, the organization is now considering the opportunity to enable a larger number of troops for accepting this broader range of transaction possibilities.

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