Plastic Gift Cards Go Internet in Time for Christmas
GTP Financial Services Inc. Launches new service to provide web merchants with plastic gift card technology in time for the busy 2006 Christmas season.
(PRWEB) September 3, 2006 -- GTP Financial Services announced today the official launch of their AcmeCard.com service. AcmeCard.com is designed to provide all the design, development and tracking services to web merchants for them to run their own plastic gift card service. Unlike “real world” solutions, requiring special hardware to activate and accept, only AcmeCard offers web merchants the ability to order, manage and sell gift cards created for their website all via the internet.
In recent surveys, over 60% of adult Americans reported purchasing gift cards and this trend only seems to increase each year. Between 2003 and 2004 the purchase of gift cards doubled nation-wide. Web merchants have a unique opportunity to provide their unique and highly sought digital and physical goods to consumers via gift card. The total value of the gift card market in the USA during 2004 was $17B. With a predicted 50% of consumers shopping online in 2007/2008 this means that online gift cards are the future.
GTP Financial services has taken their robust GoToPAY Transaction backend and provided a simple and powerful means for merchants of any size to sell (or give) gift cards to their consumer base without having to buy new equipment or learn new product selling techniques. Merchants gain new revenue sources for products and have the advantage of being paid for goods and services in advance of any ordering. GTP charges a small transaction fee when the card is actually redeemed online through the merchant site so the expense (other than card production) only occurs when the customer redeems a card.
The AcmeCard can be used in one of three ways:
1) Gift Card- Plastic card sold via their website, redeemable for the face amount and with a carrying balance for the consumer to use as they see fit.
2) Promotional Cash- Merchants can reward customers with plastic cards with denominations that give incentive to the consumer to repurchase goods and services. Merchants who attend trade shows or conventions find this a great way to introduce new customers to their offerings while being able to track each and every card from convention floor to customer sign up.
3) Affiliate Off Web marketing- Cards can be provided to website affiliates to “give away” with each affiliate being traceable and provides full reporting and statistics to the website owner. Funded by internal credits, the consumer treats the card as cash and has nothing to lose by visiting the merchant and redeeming the card.
The card technology was designed from the ground up for security and flexibility. The cards can be produced in any quantity needed by the merchant from 10-1,000,000 in various designs to best convey the website or service. Every card is track able and can be controlled by the merchant with complete security and peace of mind. In addition to system security, the actual cards can have unique serialized holograms hot stamped into the card much like credit cards to ensure compete security for the website and trust in the consumer.
The AcmeCard service provides end to end production for the cards, reporting and statistics to the site owner and a full API for developers who want to dig deep into the process. Initially the card program is geared to larger sites or custom developed shopping carts with developers but plans are in place to develop plug-ins for the major shopping cart packages on the market (Take Note: Free SDK, API and Sandbox for cart developers). Transaction fees are comparable to credit card transactions and there is no merchant setup fee. Full program details can be found at www.acmecard.com or www.affilaitecashcard.com .
GTP Financial Services was founded in 2003 to create a powerful and simple means to enable web merchants to accept non-credit card payments with security, trust and zero fraud. GTP is based in Victoria BC Canada.
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