What do micropayment trends reveal about consumer payment habits?

By Puja Sharma

Customers Prefer cashless and touchless payments, which drive significantly more revenue

Cantaloupe, Inc., a digital payments and software services company that provides end-to-end technology solutions to power self-service commerce, recently completed its 2023 Micropayment Trends Report, which studied micropayment trends (transactions less than $10) at food and beverage vending and amusement machines throughout the United States and Canada in 2022. The results, which covered a sample of more than 700,000 active Cantaloupe card readers, showed that consumers are increasingly using cashless payment methods — even for smaller ticket transactions.

“Cantaloupe has a unique perspective in the micropayments space, which is different from other payment processors,” noted Ravi Venkatesan, CEO of Cantaloupe, Inc. “Cantaloupe’s network of over 1.15 million active locations is spread throughout many industry verticals, so while this report focuses on just a sliver of self-service retail types, we can extrapolate larger trends from this data and are excited with the momentum in self-service commerce that it highlights.”

According to the report, consumers spent more than $2.5 billion at food and beverage vending machines in 2022, a 19% increase over 2021. At those particular machines, cashless payments accounted for 67% of all sales in 2022, an increase of 11% from 2021. Of those cashless sales, tap-to-pay made up an average of 53% of cashless sales for the year. In terms of consumer purchases, the study found that the average cashless ticket size for food and beverage vending machine purchases was $2.11, compared to only $1.36 for cash purchases.

In the amusement category, the data around cash versus cashless payments follow a similar pattern. Cashless payments made up an average of 73% of total sales volume at amusement gaming machines in 2022. Additionally, the average cashless ticket size at amusement gaming machines for play purchases was $5.32, compared to only $0.93 for cash purchases. This difference highlights that consumers on average will spend 5 times more when initiating or extending their play using a cashless payment method at an amusement gaming machine.

“Our 2022 sales data reinforces that consumers spend more when they go cashless, to a staggering degree,” added Ravi Venkatesan. “For self-service retail operators, this showcases the significant revenue increases they can realize by having cashless card readers on their machines. Especially since for food and beverage vending machines alone in 2023, we expect cashless payment transactions to grow six-to-eight percent and contactless payments to grow six=to-seven percent.”

The report also focused on how larger economic trends impacted the self-service retail industry. With concerns about inflation in the price of consumer goods this past year, vending particularly could have been negatively impacted. However, the report shows that even as the rate of inflation increased (peaking in June 2022 at 9.1%), and even as operators increased prices in response, vending machine purchases remained stable. Cantaloupe’s team noted how this validates the resiliency of food and beverage vending services.

Additionally, the adoption of Europay, Mastercard, and Visa (EMV) security standards for payment cards also has had an impact on self-service retail. 2022 was the year that EMV became the new normal at food and beverage vending machines, self-service kiosks, and micro markets. Cantaloupe found that EMV payments grew more than 350 percent as a share of cashless sales at food and beverage vending machines over the year.

“We are excited about the results of our 2023 Micropayments Trends Report,” he added. “Our findings reinforce the consensus that consumers are shifting to cashless and contactless payment options, even for smaller, on-the-go purchases. We feel the trends revealed in the report are relevant to self-service retail as a whole and look forward to observing how they evolve in 2023.”