PayRange Opinion Interview

 

One of the two questions I get all the time in my current position is "what should I be doing about a cashless system." I’ve decided to ask other owners for their opinions as part of my blog series. Here is another opinion. This one is about PayRange from a gentleman by the name of Justin who recently sold a store that he had.

How long did you own your store?
10 years.

When did you decide to add a cashless system?
I started looking at cash systems in 2018 and I decided in 2019 to go with PayRange.

What made you start looking at the cashless system?
I had a lot of large machines and I was always having to put money into my changer. At least once a month I’d have to dump in $500 or $1000 into the changer. It was just a nature of the strip mall I was in that a lot of people came to get quarters from the businesses as well as from the apartments around me. 
Plus more and more things in the world were becoming card based so I wanted to do something with that. I wanted to be one of the first laundromats in the area to have a cashless system rather than play catch up to my competition. I also wanted to differentiate myself from the competition.

What made you decide on Payrange?
Two things. The cost was really really low. At the time they had a deal where you could get readers and the price was really low, something like $25 per machine. I don’t remember exactly how much, but then if someone used the machine you got that money back, so I essentially paid almost nothing to have my whole store equipped with a cashless option. The second reason was they kept claiming it was very easy to install and that I would not need to pay someone to install it.  I was very skeptical at first about that. When they sent over their instructions, it was very easy. It was not perfect. There were a few machines that were not exactly the way that they said they were in the instructions. I found out later that was because they had a different version of the computer board and what was normally put in those machines. That was partly to my replacing boards as well as different boards being done by the manufacturer when they did an upgrade on that model machine.

What did you enjoy about PayRange?
It came in very handy during Covid. I had people that were not interested in dropping eight dollars worth of quarters into a machine. So I noticed that that was when my PayRange results started to go up. Before then I had maybe 5% of my customers.  After Covid it was more like 20%. More importantly I did not have to go to the bank as often. I noticed that instead of filling up my change machines every month by getting extra quarters it was every 6 to 7 weeks. That doesn’t sound like much but that eliminated five or six trips to the bank for quarters every year, plus the time of unwrapping quarters.

What are the advantages of going with PayRange versus other systems, and what other systems did you look at before deciding on PayRange?
I did not look at any other systems in depth. I knew of several of them and had gone to different stores to look at them.  The price per machine was what appeal to me about PayRange.

Did you encounter any problems installing it or when the devices were running?
For the most part everything went in great. There was a couple of little things that I found out through trial and error. The first one is that you have to make sure the settings on the reader are correct. 
The second is that there are some manufactures that have different models even though they look the same they’re not 100%, the same and so a reader for one machine might have to be set up slightly different than a reader for another machine even though it’s the same model they could be different series or made at different times, or have a different control board, When I discovered that I could contact the support team via email, they usually had an answer for me in a day or two.

People ask about the float. The float is the amount of money that a person has on the app or on a card that may have not spent at your store yet. Some systems give the owner the complete control and access to the float and others do not. PayRange is one that does not. Did that bother you?
Never thought about it that much because I was more concerned about making sure I was able to provide an option for people. In retrospect, it’s nice that I had access to just the money that they spent at my store. If there was ever a problem with things that they put on PayRange app, I did not have to deal with  that. The customer would have to go to PayRange and that made my life more easy.

PayRange has a number of different hardware options now. Did you look at any of those?
At the time I had my store, Payrange only had readers for the machines they didn’t have anything else.



Did you have to do anything special to get people to use the app?
I did try several of the pre-built promotions that PayRange has in their system. I did things like people got a free start on a washer or dryer if they downloaded the app, and I also did some of their rewards programs. One was if people spent a certain amount of money in my store, they would get a certain amount of money on a coupon that they could use  at a different time. 

What was the total adoption rate of people that used the app?
I got it up to about 15%. There were probably things I could have done more to promote it.
I did not have a ton of big banners or posters and I mostly just talked about it through word-of-mouth and some small signs. If I were still the owner of that laundromat, I would have a lot more promotion materials for it than what I did.

Did you attract any new customers because of having PayRange?
I did have quite a few people that once they found out about it liked it. A number of my regular customers that were only using quarters converted over to it, including a lot more older people than I thought. I had some people that were used to using apps. They switched over to it as well. At the time if I promoted it more on outside things like mailings or internet ads, I probably would’ve had a few more.

You’ve mentioned a couple times about promotions, do you recommend that anyone putting in a cashless system promote their new system and how do you suggest they do it?
You definitely have to incentivize people at first to use the app. People are so conditioned to spending quarters that they will, naturally just think to do that. How you want to incentivize people to use the system I think depends a little bit on where you’re located. 

If you had to do it again, would you use PayRange, try more options that they have out there, or go with a different system entirely?
I was fine with PayRange. If they had other things to try, I might look at them.

Thanks to Justin for his candor.
I have asked others to comment on their payment systems.
If they send them to me I will publish their opinion on their system.
I hope this helps in your decision making about what system to go with.

Ev
A Heck of A Nice Guy