Imagine you come back to your car one afternoon only to discover a parking ticket in the windshield. After analysing the situation, you begrudgingly admit that the ticket was waranted and that you won’t bother fighting it. However, that still puts you in the hated situation of having to go to the city hall, or some police station, or even have to mail a check or any other archaic way that costs precious time and annoys you to no end. If only there was some way to pay the thing without going through all this hassle. Well, thanks to an American software development company called Terrible Labs, now there is just such a way. Introducing… TicketZen!
Although it started out as a response to a tweet by Kayak co-founder Paul English(“I want an iPhone app to take a photo of any parking ticket and pay for it from a credit card on file.”), TicketZen is now an app developed for both iOS and Android that allows you to scan the code of the parking ticket and then pay for it online via credit card. It’s just as easy as scanning any QR code right now, and it saves you precious time and energy. No more waiting in line alongside other disgruntled drivers, now you can just scan the code, select the city in which you got fined, select your payment method, and then with a single click of a button the payment is done.
Currently, TicketZen only works in eight cities across the United States, however, this year it is scheduled to be rolled out in over a hundred cities in North America, Europe and Australia. That means that most large cities and capitals in these areas will be covered in their entirety by TicketZen, making drivers’ lives alot easier than now. As a user of this app commented on the company’s Twitter page, „This thing makes you want to get more parking tickets 😉 just scan and pay.”.
From an economic perspective, the revenue model is based on the one dollar fee per ticket paid(which will presumably be adapted to different currencies when the rollout takes place this year), fittingly dubbed a „convenience fee” by its creators. It’s easy to see that given the current status of things in major western cities, this app will not only make things easier for naughty drivers, but will most likely make its creators quite a bit of money as well.
However, they’re not stopping here. The lead developer of the project says that he hopes to one day have the app serve as „the sole solution to pay your city, no matter the payment type… parking ticket, real estate tax, court fees, and so on.”. Only time will tell if his vision will actually become a reality, but for now, TicketZen has a huge potential, and we can only wait and see how it evolves.
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Consumer Value Creation 