ShoutingInDigital

BillMyParents.com – Retailers return to nagging children for sales

Posted by James | Filed under news

BillMyParents.com – a new online payment system – has just launched, giving children and teenagers more freedom to shop online, at their parent’s expense, of course.

The e-payment start-up is hoping that e-commerce website owners will place the BillMyParents button next to products – enabling children and ‘creditcard-less’ teenagers to make purchases online.

Naturally, BillMyParents does not actually give children direct access to their parent’s credit cards – that would be ludicrous.

It does, however, do the next best thing – sending parents an e-mail with a link to the product they would like to buy and an optional begging note from the child – which for the children who excel in nagging and begging is pretty much the same as having the credit card in their hands.

After the parents receive the e-mail, they are then given the option of approving or denying the purchase(s) – and are even given the option of paying for items on an individual basis.

Traditional retailers and supermarkets have long understood the sales potential of a nagging child. The hard-selling, adrenaline-raising adverts that appear around Christmas are a classic example of this, as are the careful placement of the sweets at the supermarket checkout.

Children and teenagers have always been a core demographic for retailers, but the need for a credit card has made it difficult for retailers to truly cash in on this.

Jim Collas of SocialWise – which owns BillMyParents – says that while youth spending accounts for around $28 billion on the web, there’s a further $40 billion spent offline by children who’ve researched their product on the web but couldn’t buy it online for lack of a credit card.

While BillMyParents has yet to attract any customers, there is certainly a huge, practically untouched market out there that retailers have yet to take advantage of. BillMyParents will no doubt be followed by a succession of start-ups – all hoping to crack the youth online shopping market.

Tags: family, industry