Shopmium Adds Venmo to Its Cash Back Offerings

Savings app Shopmium has integrated Venmo into its cash-back redemption offering.

As the Salt Lake City company said in a Thursday (Aug. 24) news release, this means its users can now connect and use their Venmo accounts to get cash-back deposits. Until now, shoppers have only been able to get cash back through Shopmium via Venmo owner PayPal.

“Getting cash back should be easy. With the impact of rising prices on everyday items, consumers are looking for ways to shop smarter, not harder,” Lisa Thompson, savings expert at Shopmium, said in a news release.

“We’re thrilled to add Venmo as a payment option because it is a trusted, secure digital wallet that’s a natural fit to redeem cash. Together, Shopmium is bringing shoppers savings while Venmo is allowing them to access that cash immediately and grow their digital wallets.”

Thompson’s comments about consumer price worries are borne out by recent PYMNTS research showing that high prices are the largest concern among 83% of people who are at least somewhat worried about the state of the economy.

Consumers from all demographics pointed to higher prices as their chief concern, including 91% of baby boomers and seniors and 73% of bridge millennials, 81% of people earning more than $100,000 per year and 83% of those earning below $50,000 per year.

“As consumer perceptions tend to be consistent without extreme price fluctuations in either direction, consumers may continue to carry on with their budget-tightening behavior until given a more significant reason to change,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this month.

And budgets could grow even tighter still as consumers continue to deplete their savings. As noted here last week, recent Federal Reserve research shows that the multi-trillion dollar savings cushion built up during the pandemic is all but exhausted.

“Our updated estimates suggest that households held less than $190 billion of aggregate excess savings by June,” Hamza Abdelrahman and Luiz Oliveira, researchers for the nation’s central bank, wrote in a blog entry.

“There is considerable uncertainty in the outlook,” they continued, “but we estimate that these excess savings are likely to be depleted during the third quarter of 2023.”

Even if their numbers are off somewhat, the researchers maintain that any leftover funds” “will not be a major driver of spending growth going forward primarily because of the front-loaded dynamics of spending responses to changes in income and wealth.”

And PYMNTS has also noted that those savings weren’t proportionately distributed, with households in the top tier of the income bracket holding 75% of that money.