Who needs paper! - Part 2

Though phrasing their headline as a question, rather than a statement, the Economist has published an interesting article also called "Who Needs Paper?"

What I find particularly interesting, is that the article mentions that Continental Airlines is testing a system to deliver tickets to traveler's mobile phones using the same technology as the Digital Coupons I talked about in a previous post.

Digital Coupons - part 2

A couple days after my last post on Digital Coupons insideTORONTO ran an article about the Downtown Yonge BIA providing its 2000 members the ability to offer digital coupons through its Mobile Yonge program. : Yonge Street stores going high-tech


Though not explained very well on the Mobile Yonge site, the system works by choosing coupons on their website or through a mobile version of their website. Then if you have a decent mobile internet browser, you redeem the coupon by viewing its unique bar code on your phone's screen, which the cashier scans at the time of purchase.

If you don't have a good browser, you're left to print the coupon at home and bring it with you.

I signed up to try it out, and I must say that only having two coupons available is a little underwhelming. I hope they have a lot more in the pipeline.

Digital Coupons

Some grocers are experimenting with digital coupons. The most promising of these looks to be a system where coupons are “loaded” onto the shoppers loyalty card. The shopper selects coupons online adding the coupons to their account. Then, at the register, the system retrieves the coupons for the products purchased.

What seems to be missing from these systems are options for the shopper to remember what coupons they have “clipped” once they are already in the store. Right now, the shopper needs to go online to look at their list and print it off.

An option to retrieve the list from a SMS text message might be helpful for the younger, on-the-go crowd, but they are not usually the target demographic for coupon clipping. In store kiosks may be a smarter option for the target coupon clipper. The kiosk would allow shoppers to scan their card to receive a print-out their coupon shopping list. Stores that already have self serve check-out kiosks might be able to avoid additional capital expense by adding this extra feature to this existing infrastructure.

There are also other types of digital coupons out there. One example is with mobile phones where the consumer takes a picture of an advertisement with their cell phone and sends it to a short code. The picture is matched to an available promotion, and a coupon is sent to the consumer’s cell phone. One company that provides this service is Snaptell.