Payments with Your Cell Phone

It’s not often that I can give props to two Denver area companies, but today the Imulus crew went out to lunch to one of the frequent stops, Spicy Pickle. Before we entered the store we were greated by a guy obviously trying to solicit business for something; this time it was Boulder based Mocapay. His sell was compelling: send a text message to this number (I forget the number) and you will receive a code which will give you an $8 credit on your next purchase inside Spicy Pickle. Not afraid to sell our souls for marketing purposes, Bruce and I decided to partake.

To my surprise it worked as sold. I ordered my Athena Pizzette plus a Half n Half Ice Tea and my grand total of $10.23 only cost me a $2.23 after the $8 discount. If you complete the account setup and deposit $10 in your account, you’ll receive $700 total of promotional offers, not bad!

Once I had a chance to digest both my pizzette and the Mocapay service, I came to the conclusion that just swiping my credit card was a bit easier. The cell phone was a nice convenience but usually I have my wallet handy and that seems to work fine for me. I really think Mocapay’s target market is the youth between ages of 10 and 16. That age group often lacks credit cards but more and more they are carrying cell phones. Perhaps mom and dad can load their kids up with Mocapay moolah rather then giving them plastico-fantastico. I haven’t completed the account setup yet, but it appears to be a pretty sound service, which I’ll likely mess around with in the future.