YouPay: the new way to pay online

There was cash, then credit card, then AfterPay – now there’s YouPay. 

The brainchild of Logan entrepreneur Matt Holme, YouPay offers a new option for online shopping and was the recent winner of the Best Innovation in Merchant Experience title in the WeMoney Business Awards. 

YouPay, which allows shoppers to share online shopping carts so that others can pay for goods, isn’t Matt’s first entrepreneurial endeavour. He launched MyWork , a web design company, in Springwood in 2009. 

The idea for YouPay came about in lockdown, when Matt was passing time the way many of us did when cooped up at home – online shopping. 

‘I wanted to buy my wife something online, and she was on one side of the house sending me links to things she liked and shopping carts she’d filled, and I was on the other. She copied and pasted her carts to me thinking I could just pay for the purchase but that wouldn’t work as all her shopping was stored on her device; she had to give me her phone for me to key in the payment details. 

‘At that time, if anyone else had wanted to do that for her they wouldn’t have been able to because they needed to be with her and see her device. When I realised that, this idea of cart sharing started to form.’ 

There was immediate interest from some investors and YouPay quickly grew from a side project to becoming, in 2021, a fully-fledged business.  

‘We went quite quickly from one merchant to what we have now, which is around 500 merchants who are set up so that their customers can pay using YouPay,’ Matt says. 

‘We’ve seen 100,000 transactions. The great thing is that people can share their carts while keeping details completely private – so for example, if you are an online streamer using Twitch or any social media platform you could share your cart with your followers giving them the option to support you via purchases and it is safe and risk-free. 

‘There is a wide spectrum of people who can use it – kids and parents, husband and wife, corporates – We just wanted to get it out there to see who likes it. 

Matt talks about the 4 Ps who use YouPay – Parents, Partners, Professional, and Purpose – a charity arm which was enormously successful in late 2022 when YouPay Giving was launched. 

‘We know that there is sometimes a level of skepticism about giving to charity – if you give $100 you don’t know where it is going or how much goes right to the cause – but on the other hand, if you donate a gift it can be an ordeal to get the right things in the hands of the right people,’ Matt says. 

‘We partnered with a charity last year supporting children with cancer, and those children and their families were able to create carts which were endorsed by us, and people could look in those carts and purchase gifts for the children.  

‘We had some great stories of kids picking out items and receiving them. The hospitals and charity loved it because it wasn’t random – the kids were getting things they really wanted.’ 

Matt says that if the 2 main forms of payment used now are instant payments – credit cards and cash – and buy now/pay later, like AfterPay, he hopes YouPay will eventually be seen as the third form of payment. 

‘That’s a very ambitious statement for us to make so we know we can’t go in halfheartedly, we have to be all-in, and we have been from very early on,’ he says. 

‘It’s been a hell of a ride, but it is still early days – it is exciting to be in 500 stores but AfterPay, for example, is in 92,000 stores so there is a long way to go.’ 

The next step for YouPay is the creation of an app which would allow users to use YouPay everywhere – even at stores where YouPay is not integrated.  

‘By doing this, it is obviously great for the user, but it also allows us to show bigger companies what they can gain by getting on board as merchants. Our data is very powerful in terms of the relationships between customers – you can see families or friend groups, instead of just separate customers,’Matt says. 

He says the recent award win was the perfect way to kick off a big year for YouPay. 

‘We had our heads down last year and this year it is more about sharing what we have built so winning this award and being recognised by WeMoney was a big part of that and a huge honour,’ he says. 

‘For us to be in that category alongside the likes of NAB for example was great.’ 

Keen to join the YouPay movement? Find out more on the YouPay website.