The main objective of PAGITA overall innovation project is to let European customers paying purchases on vending machines by using a virtual wallet, without need of cash.
PAGITA is a mobile commerce and mobile marketing solution for Automatic Vending Machines (the “VM”) and it enables Automatic Vending operators (the “Vending Companies” or “VC”) to accept orders and payments from customers’ smartphones, without need to rely on coins or banknotes. The solution is composed by a Mobile app, a micro-computer installed on vending machine and a web portal providing data an statistics to vending companies.
Problem. The automatic vending market has high operating costs due to cash management and theft. A large portion of vending machines are “unintelligent”, they do not communicate any info on current stock and they do not enable optimization for logistics. Vending operators cannot collect any information on their customers and their purchasing patterns.
Opportunity. Every day, 90 million food and drink items are purchased by European consumers from a vending machine: there are on average 130 Europeans per vending machine, and this ranges from just over 60 in the Netherlands to 895 in Russia. Most part of vending systems are placed in workplaces (over 80%), as they facilitate employees to grab a quick snack in between breaks without the need of placing an order and waiting for it to be processed . Around 20% of the vending machines are found in the so-called “public vending sector”: these machines are located in schools, universities and other educational establishments, at public authorities, in hospitals, petrol and service stations, hotels and at train stations, in tube stations, airports and public areas. The increasing consumer preference toward cashless payments is a favourable trend observed in the market. The acceptance of payments through technologies, such as Near-field Communication (NFC), is instrumental in driving public interest owing to the easier, faster, and contactless modes of payment . These modes help in decreasing the cash management costs and subsequently decrease threats such as theft and vandalism: indeed, cash management and associated costs (theft, damages, insurance,…) may account up to 15% of an Automatic Vending Machine revenue. Indeed, the automatic vending has some intrinsic peculiarities which cause direct costs or hinder revenue growth. Those are: Lack of information on customers profile, lack of information on sales and available stock, lack of direct marketing tools around the points of sale, cash management costs (logistic, insurance,...) theft and related damages (including missed revenue for machines out of order).
PAGITA wants to address those issues, reducing the cash utilization (and thus the costs and risks associated), and transforming the interaction with the customers using digital technology. PAGITA enables the Vending Companies to save on these operational costs and to collect business intelligence information on sales and customers; in addition, it allows customers to avoid using cash for purchase in vending machine. After having tested its solution in Italian market (the main European market as per number of Vending machines), PAGITA is now addressing the European market. The feasibility study has the purpose to validate on EU market the Italian business case. The objectives of the feasibility study will be then:
