A trial to replace physical newspaper vouchers with digital vouchers in Kent has won the endorsement of participating stores.

PayPoint told Better Retailing in December that trials were underway with Daily Mail publisher DMG Media to test moving over to IMovo vouchers.

These are scanned by PayPoint terminals and automatically credited to the retailer.

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This month, sources revealed to Better Retailing that the trial was to last six months, beginning last August, and was taking place in the Tonbridge area.

Soban Shanmuganathan’s Victoria House Stores & Post Office in neighbouring Tunbridge Wells is one of those taking part. He told Better Retailing: “We’ve taken these vouchers for The Guardian previously, but I first started getting a few paper-voucher customers for other titles come in around four months ago with digital cards to be scanned instead.

“It’s been pretty good, and if it replaced all paper vouchers, it would save me around an hour per week – we have 100 news delivery customers and 35-40% use vouchers.

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“There are often complications like Telegraph vouchers being rejected even though they were well within date when I sent them. I’d be in favour of anything that removed these problems.”

A staff member at another centrally owned store in the area agreed, telling Better Retailing: “The first we knew about it was when they started coming in with these plastic cards, but there’s been absolutely no problems at all.”

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