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what he calls a no-limits gift card experience, McCarthy points to
Gyft, a company First Data acquired 2014. The mobile app and e- commerce site enable consumers to buy gift cards from a few hundred merchants, but physical gift cards aren’t sent. Buyers receive a text or email barcode and can redeem the value instantly on a mobile device or computer, or merchants simply scan the barcode in-store. “The entire experience can be virtual, but if the consumer wants to go in-store, that works, too,” he says.
Holiday Trending
In 2015, First Data acquired another digital gifting company, Transaction Wireless, which o ers a series of tools to help merchants distribute gift cards and grow their businesses. Recently the company set up a ash site for Olive Garden to promote the restaurant chain’s “Never Ending Pasta Pass” special. The promotion entitled consumers to unlimited pasta twice a day for 60 days. “Twenty- ve thousand consumers were in a virtual line to buy the Never Ending Pasta Pass and it was sold out in 2 seconds,”
volume 9 • spring 2016
Every customer contact point needs to be an integrated total experience. ...
There should be no boundaries or di erentiation between digital and mobile and in-store—just an experience.
—Barry C. McCarthy, First Data
card provider, and fraud and risk specialist—enable it to provide the back-end integration required for seamless consumer, business and employee experiences. To illustrate
First Data’s Holiday 2015 SpendTrend Report
revealed that more than one- fth (20.2 percent) of all U.S. holiday shopping now happens online, a segment that has seen steady growth in recent years. Based on transaction data from 1.3 million U.S. merchant loca- tions, First Data also found that retail sales were up
3.3 percent for the full holiday season. The sales growth was a marginal increase over 2014’s year-over-year growth of 3.2 percent.
“I think holiday 2015 further reinforced the notion that commerce has gone omnichannel,” notes Barry C. McCarthy, executive vice president of Network and Security Solutions, First Data. “Consumers are increasingly willing to
do all of their holiday shopping online or on their phones.”
Online shoppers were inclined to spend more than those at the register with purchases averaging $125.72 per transaction compared with $69.64 at brick-and-mortar locations.
In terms of when shoppers were spending, Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday dominated the holiday season, showing the highest year-over-year growth of 6.3 percent for the entire holiday period. The last two weeks of December, however, also showed higher concentration of sales.
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