Here’s another cool program from Walmart-the new “pay with cash” for online purchases!
Up until now if you wanted to buy something online but didn’t have or want to use a credit card you were pretty much out of luck. Enter Walmart.com’s new “pay with cash” program.
You place your order online, are emailed a bar code, then you go to any cash register at your local Walmart within 48 hours. There they will scan in your bar code, you pay in cash and the order is finalized. Then it will ship either to home or for “site to store”.
Here’s a video where I walk you through the ordering process:
Walmart’s Pay with Cash
The pay with cash program is NOT available with the “Pick up Today” program. In that case just go into the store and pick it up off the shelf yourself and pay at any register 🙂
This program is great for those customers who may not be eligible for a credit card due to their age or their credit history, or just anyone who chooses not to use a traditional bank.
Also, because there are many more items available on Walmart.com than are present in the stores cash customers now have access to a much wider range of products. Cash customers now also have the ability to order gifts and have them shipped to someone else-an option that has never been available to cash customers before!
What do you think? Do you have use for the “pay with cash” program?
****This is a sponsored post****
Disclosure: This is a sponsored post I am participating in with the Walmart Moms. Walmart has provided me with compensation for this post. My participation is voluntary and opinions, as always are my own.
I probably won’t use the program (I almost never use the Walmart website), but I’m definitely go to tell my sil about it. She is currently ineligible for a bank account, so this kind of program would be useful for her.
I am encouraged by any business who makes it easier for someone to use cash. Also I find so much more variety online at walmart.com than in there stores and ship to store option is great.
I like the program, but it definitely needs a more descriptive name. My first reaction was “Oh, so now they’re playing up that you can actually use cash in the stores”; I didn’t connect it with on-line purchases.
My first thought, once I understood that it was for on-line purchases, was this would be *really* cool if you could use it to pay for purchases on other web sites as well. Amazon & PayPal have credit card payment processing pretty well sewn up, but no one else has the bricks-and-mortar presence to pull off physical payment processing. I have no idea whether the existing infrastructure permits the delayed approvals on pseudo-credit cards that would make this work.
What a business case: In addition to increasing the number of customers through its doors, WalMart would be insinuating itself into millions of transactions per month.
I’m all for preserving the utility of cash, despite pressures to the contrary.
Lance ==)————————
Lance-it’s not quite as elegant a solution, but an option out there that Walmart offers for the “unbanked” is their Walmart Money Card. There is a $3 monthly fee-but it’s basically a debit card that you can just go into the store and buy with no credit check, no bank account etc. So someone could get one of those cards, load cash onto it, pay $3 a month and then use that for online purchases. There is a tiny bit more to it than that-but it’s an option that is especially good for those who are unbanked for a variety of reasons. I’m sure they will offer me the opportunity to write a more detailed post on that in the future 😉
Here is a thought: Can you use a Wal-Mart gift card to pay for purchases online at WalMart.com? If so, then gift cards are free, you can go to store & purchase one for whatever amount you want (& reload it later) at no cost.
Hmmm. I’m not sure if that would work or not. ..