Magento Gold Partner On Tap today announce they have implemented Pennies, the electronic charity box for online retailer Party Pieces. Pennies allows customers to donate their spare change to charity when paying by card or electronically. On Tap is the first eCommerce agency to implement a Pennies solution using the Magento platform.
Jane Brook, Director at On Tap said: “When Party Pieces asked On Tap to implement the Pennies feature on their Magento ecommerce store we immediately recognised the brilliance and simplicity of the concept, so much so that we were happy for Party Pieces to donate our fee to their chosen charity, The Rainbow Trust Children’s Charity, to launch this fantastic project. From a technical point of view, integration with the checkout was very straight forward indeed and support from the Pennies team throughout the process was outstanding.”
“There can be no more simple or effective method for online retailers to promote their chosen charity and achieve their corporate social responsibility objectives than presenting the option for customers to donate a few pennies electronically at the point of checkout. Genius!”
Carole Middleton, founder of Party Pieces said “I think this is simply a brilliant idea which I hope everyone will get behind. Just by donating a few pennies, your spare change, we can help make a huge difference to families who really need our support”
Alison Hutchinson, CEO of The Pennies Foundation, commented: “We’re delighted that On Tap are helping to drive the Pennies movement and using technology to open up micro-donations for online retailers. Customer donations are already adding up, providing much needed funds for charity and ultimately making a huge difference to people’s lives.”
The announcement comes as two more online retailers join the Pennies movement; BuySpares and Contact Lenses Express have both recently implemented Pennies in their websites using in house teams.
Nick Hall, Head of Strategic Planning at BuySpares said “Working with people who we are not familiar with can often make integration projects very laborious. However, following a scoping meeting with Pennies we quickly discovered that the amount of work actually required was quite small and from a technical point of view everything was quite straightforward. Together, we designed the user experience, imagery, and built new mechanisms to add the donations within our platform in just a few development days proving that implementation can be done quite painlessly.”
The new retailers are in good company with Pennies’ other national partners which include Domino’s Pizza, Zizzi restaurants and The Entertainer toy shop chain. Since launching 10 national retailers and many smaller merchants have implemented Pennies, allowing customers to give quickly, securely, privately and conveniently. The consumer response has been very positive with more than £435,000 being raised for 28 different charities from over 1.7 million individual donations.
Breaking new ground, Pennies is a new channel for an old habit – dropping a few coins into a charity box on a shop counter – brought up to date to give consumers the choice to donate a few extra pennies when they pay by card. Retailers can now switch on the Pennies technology in stores, ranging from high street chains to corner shops, as well as for online and mobile purchases.
-ENDS-
Notes to Editors:
For further information contact:
Liz Kearsley, Pennies
Tel: 07814 047 175
Clare Allison, Teamspirit PR
Tel: 020 7360 7877
Beth Gaudin, Teamspirit PR
Tel: 020 7360 7877
About Pennies:
The Pennies Foundation, a registered charity, has created Pennies, the electronic charity box. We’re all familiar with the idea of dropping our change into the charity box sitting on the shop counter. The electronic charity box is exactly the same idea but it works instead when we pay by card in store, online and increasingly by mobile. That means that it works just as well for online or high-street shopping.
Pennies makes giving to charity easy and affordable for all: customers can simply press ‘YES’ on the Chip PIN machine in-store, or click the ‘Donate’ button online. The request is for micro-donations – literally a few pennies (1p-99p) – either by rounding up or topping up. The Pennies Foundation then ensures that all the donations are received and distributed to UK charities.
The retailer nominates the charity or charities to benefit from the majority of the amount collected with the remainder shared amongst other UK charities which cover a range of causes like cancer, children, homelessness and the elderly.
It’s quick: one small step in the payment process, it’s the consumers’ choice and it’s private too. There’s no pressure or commitment to give and every penny goes to charity.
Micro-donations are powerful. There are 43 million card holders in the UK today, and around 1 million card transactions an hour. If the UK’s card holders donated 30p once a month well over £150m would be raised for charity every year.
Pennies launched with its first retailer, Domino’s Pizza in November 2010. Since then Travelodge, Zizzi, The Entertainer, Rugby Football Union, Barracudas Kids Camps, GO Outdoors, Meatballs restaurant, Party Pieces, BuySpares and Contact Lenses Express have also adopted Pennies, with more retailers launching during 2012. Pennies is inclusive and welcomes retailers of any size or channel to join the Pennies’ movement.
About On Tap:
On Tap are the UK’s longest serving Magento partner, providing consultancy, design, build, support, training and hosting services.
www.ontapgroup.com
About Party Pieces:
• Party Pieces is the UK’s leading party supplier and has been helping customers create magical parties for over 25 years. When founder Carole Middleton started Party Pieces with a few pre-filled party bags in the garden shed her dream was and still is to inspire other mothers to create magical parties at home and to make party organising that little bit easier.
• Party Pieces has come a long way since then with a warehouse bursting with the latest children’s party themes, as well as party paraphernalia for summer parties, birthday milestones, Easter, Christmas and just about every get-together for families and friends.
• With a long history of supporting charities, Party Pieces is very excited to have Pennies enabled on its website, giving them a new avenue for raising funds for their nominated charity Rainbow Trust Children’s Charity. So, the next time you are purchasing your party goods at Party Pieces, why not round up your purchase to the nearest 50p?
• Explore our website www.partypieces.co.uk and order your catalogue now www.partypieces.co.uk
Published on: 12:40PM on 7th March 2012
