The Girl Scouts of Ohio’s Heartland Council has begun using AppNinjas Inc.’s Swipe Credit Card Terminal for iPhone to accept credit and debit cards from consumers buying members’ cookies, the organization announced March 9.
Based in Columbus, Ohio, the council services more than 30 counties and is the third Girl Scout council to use a mobile payments-acceptance service to accept card payments. The Girl Scouts of North East Ohio and the Girl Scouts San Diego in February both announced plans to use mobile readers (
The Heartland Girl Scout troops will use the devices to accept credit and debit card payments through the end of this month, a spokesperson from the Heartland council tells PaymentsSource.
“We believe [using a mobile card reader] will help make cookie buying easier for consumers when we are selling the cookies at booths in retail locations this month,” the spokesperson explains. “Accepting cash or checks may be a barrier for some consumers, as most consumers pay for everything using cards, and it alleviates any potential bad debt we may get from accepting bad checks.”
After the individual troops delivered their initial cookie orders at the end of February, many members still had cookies left over. They will sell those at booths at retail locations and at major events, the spokesperson says. And because consumers now may use their cards to buy cookies, which cost $3.50 per box, many likely will buy more than one box, the spokesperson adds.
AppNinjas’ reader normally costs $80, but the company donated 25 phone terminals and application because the Girl Scouts are a nonprofit organization and they are only testing the device, the spokesperson notes. The application is either free or 99 cents, depending on which one merchants use and whether the merchant is a new customer.
The scouts are using Merchant Focus Inc., a Dublin, Ohio-based payment gateway, to process the card transactions. The independent sales organization charges the council a small percentage of each credit and debit card sale, but the spokesperson declined to note the exact amount. No fees, however, are passed on to consumers or to each individual Girl Scout troop, she says.
Merchant Focus also is waiving its monthly $10 service fee and $15 monthly processing minimum, and it is enabling the council to suspend its account in the off season if it wants to use it again for its fall product sale, the spokesperson says.
The mobile point-of-sale market is one of the most promising areas of mobile-payments right now, says Gwenn Bézard, co-founder and research director at Boston-based Aite Group LLC. And the adoption level is starting to take off, he adds.
However, the irony is that, when the industry talks about mobile payments, many say that it is going to “kill” plastic card payments. But mobile-payment acceptance actually “has the potential to dramatically expand acceptance for cards,” Bézard contends.
The only challenge may depend on whether the U.S. begins using chip-and-PIN cards because upgrading the devices may be difficult, Bézard says. Merchants may just have to carry a slightly bulkier device, he surmises.
In either case, mobile payment card acceptance will continue to grow, Bézard notes. “Consumers have a card and are used to the concept of swiping cards, so they don’t have to learn anything new,” he says.
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