By doing so, PayNearMe enables companies in a diverse set of industries to turn millions of American households into new paying customers, it said. Consumers can use PayNearMe for e-commerce purchases, telephone [image-nocss] orders, loan repayments, or to load funds into e-wallets and more at retail locations throughout the United States.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced that Amazon.com, Facebook, Progreso Financiero, MOL AccessPortal (MOL), m-Via, Lexicon Marketing LLC, Adknowledge's Super Rewards, Money to Go and SteelSeries will be among the first merchants to use PayNearMe to provide their customers with the option to pay with cash at 7-Eleven stores.
"7-Eleven views this as an opportunity to provide even more convenience for shoppers because consumers can now easily purchase online products without the need of a debit or credit card," said Jesus Delgado-Jenkins, Dallas-based 7-Eleven Inc.'s senior vice president for merchandising and logistics. "We want 7-Eleven to be the neighborhood destination for people who prefer or need to pay in cash and to provide all consumers with the same shopping choices no matter how they wish to pay for goods and services."
Mountain View, Calif.-based PayNearMe provides "unbanked" or "underbanked" consumers with a method of payment that is simpler to use and often less expensive than current payment alternatives such as prepaid debit cards, walkup bill pay or money orders sent by mail, the company said. With PayNearMe, consumers do not need to worry about losing their prepaid cards, accumulating unused balances or being forced into prepayment instruments with fixed denominations. In addition, consumers do not need to do anything after making their payment at a local storemerchants (payees) are notified of consumers' payments immediately and transactions are completed automatically.
With PayNearMe, merchants do not have to worry about fraud, chargebacks or held funds: cash payments via PayNearMe are guaranteed 100% good, communicated in real-time and settled within days, said the company.
"PayNearMe enables almost any businesse-commerce merchants, catalogers, lenders, collection agencies and moreto provide a simpler, faster and often far less-expensive payment mechanism to their consumers," said Danny Shader, PayNearMe's CEO. "We designed PayNearMe to improve the customer experience for those who prefer to pay with cash so that businesses who serve them can grow their top and bottom lines more quickly."
PayNearMe combines a modified load network with an application development platform to increase the range of transactions that can be conducted with cash. In contrast to prepaid transactions, where consumers load value onto a card or other instrument and then "push" some or all of those funds to a payee, with PayNearMe, arbitrarily complex transactions are "staged" by the merchant (payee) and completed in real-time when consumers pay at a local store for those staged transactions. The payment process takes less than a minute, the company said.
Merchants can use PayNearMe with no integration. Alternatively, they can use PayNearMe's development platform to enable customized applications that further speed the purchase experience. Because the point-of-sale (POS) terminals at 7-Eleven stores are connected directly to PayNearMe's systems, payees are notified in real-time when their consumer has paid. They may also instruct PayNearMe to print custom messages on consumers' register receipts. These messages can be used to print gift codes, tickets, proof of insurance, loan statements, legal disclosures and more.
The technology also enables merchants to provide goods and services in ways that would not be possible with existing alternatives, the company added. For example, merchants are working with PayNearMe to provide insurance products and sell transportation tickets. Customers will leave 7-Eleven with proof of insurance or a valid ticket respectively. Both of these applications are enabled in part by PayNearMe's ability to generate and print custom messages on the register receipt.
Facebook users can buy Facebook Credits with cash using PayNearMe at a 7-Eleven store and those Credits will be deposited into users' accounts before they reach the parking lot. Facebook Credits are used to buy gifts and virtual goods in many games and applications on the Facebook platform.
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