90 per cent of gift vouchers sold at the Sydney-based rib house, Hurricane’s Grill in Darling Harbour, are now sent instantly via SMS by the restaurant’s customers.

Powered by EagleEye, the virtual gift cards outsold plastic ones by 15:1 within the first month of introduction. They are available for purchase online or at the restaurant and recipients simply enter the unique code into the EPOS terminal.

Merchants can see in real?time how well the cards are doing, plan for future voucher sales and collect data for loyalty purposes. This low-cost mCommerce solution is currently available to Commonwealth Bank merchant retailers through Eftpos-branded payment terminals.

“We now deliver a more convenient and faster service for our gift voucher products to the increasingly digitally savvy customer base, and with real?time reporting it allows us to easily measure our return on investment,” Steve Sidd, GM at Hurricanes corporate services said.

“The popularity of our mobile gift vouchers has blown us away. We are planning to extend this over to more restaurants and to the Apple iOS6 Passbook feature.”