Cashless Payments and Mobile Apps: Revolutionising Car Park Transactions

Habits change over time, in 2022 50% of all transactions in the UK were made via debit card, and 37% of transactions were contactless. That’s an incredible amount, billions of transactions.

But there’s another change moving through car parks across the UK, that makes the switch to cashless even easier, and that’s putting the control over a parking session on your site onto your visitors’ phones.

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Why switch to cashless?

People, whether that’s workers, employers, or the public – over the last few years have placed an increasing importance on efficiency.

Nobody likes having to wait around, queues are a frustration, as are hunting for change or having to have cash to pay for parking in the first place.

Moving to cashless options gets rid of those problems. Tapping a phone or card is much quicker when it comes to payments, keeping people moving a lot faster, while also getting rid of the need to be carrying cash.

Moving to an app gets rid of the need to queue entirely as parking can be taken care of before someone even arrives through pre-booking, after they’ve left through autopay or even managed on the go.

Why flexibility is important

Cash, card and contactless payments have always been seen as giving people a degree of choice over how to pay for something. An app just increases that and can help to boost your payment rates as you’re giving people the ability to pay how they want and helping to provide an alternative in the event someone doesn’t have the correct change or forgets their bank card.

Apps can go much further than handling a payment when someone is on-site too.

Additional services like pre-booking or autopsy allow your site to help people manage their parking in ways that mean they have nothing to do when they arrive as everything is already taken care of. Pre-booking lets someone arrange and pay for their parking ahead of time, while autopay tracks how long someone’s stay is and then charges them accordingly.

These services effectively mean motorists can just arrive at your car park and get on with their day a lot sooner, with the stress around having to find parking, and payment machines and manage their stay already taken care of.

They can also extend their stay through these methods, giving them more freedom as they aren’t restricted by an allotted stay time and overall, a better user experience. For a business, this can have a major impact on its bottom line as customers with fewer time constraints could browse and shop more without added time pressures.

Cashless increases security

Every business values security, not only keeping customers and staff safe but also protecting the cash that moves through a site.

Traditional car parks were an attractive prospect for thieves, with cash-only pay and display machines being filled with money. Cash collections posed a health & safety risk for the people carrying them out and paying for security companies to come and remove that money from a site could be an expensive overhead.

Moving to cashless options such as a parking app removes all those concerns. There’s no physical cash, payments are handled securely, and cash collections become a thing of the past.

Switching to purely cashless transactions could even save you money, as there are fewer security costs to manage, which is ideal as businesses continue to face increasing operating costs.

Helping you revolutionise your car park

Car parks need to evolve, and services need to adapt to reflect changing visitor requirements.

Implementing changes to your car doesn’t need to be difficult, in fact with the right support the adoption of new solutions can be incredibly easy.

At Parkingeye, we work with our clients to put the solutions in place that can revolutionise their parking, not just in terms of eliminating abuse or improving accessibility, but also in making paying and managing for parking easier.

We use the Evology Parking app, a powerful toolset that gives motorists an incredible amount of control over their parking. This includes ongoing management, not just when adding solutions to your site but also to make sure they are being used properly and that changes are being communicated to your customers, staff, and visitors correctly.

If you want to know more about parking apps and the impact they could have on your car park, get in touch using our form.