A Newport marketing agency is using its skills to design and build a website which will enable local businesses without a website or ability to accept payments online to sell electronic gift vouchers which can be redeemed by customers when it is safe to do so.

Alliance Marketing came up with the idea for www.buyavoucher.co.uk when many of its clients were either forced to close to comply with the UK government announcements or out of choice to protect themselves due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Gareth Waters, co-director of Alliance, said: “The concept is pretty straight forward. Any local business can register free of charge as a retailer and send their page link to their customer base or share via social media to encourage people to buy electronic vouchers which they can choose to use or to gift to friends and families. It will hopefully provide them with a vital income stream to assist them during the current crisis and provide their customers with something to look forward to when it is all over.”

Businesses can sign up free of charge. There is still some development work to do with the website but it is working and functioning and most importantly will enable registered businesses to start receiving money from the sales of the vouchers.

Each voucher sold will have a unique reference number which the business will be able to track when it is redeemed.

Gareth said: “We wanted to get the site live as quickly as possible. Small businesses don’t have large financial resources to draw from and time really is of the essence. We will be launching it for businesses in south east Wales but won’t prevent others from further afield from using it if they think they will benefit.”

The new website is buyavoucher.co.uk