THE rush is on to stock up on the cheaper $7 Nets CashCards, although electronic payment provider Nets says there is ample stock to last until the new - and more expensive - version hits the market next month.

Petrol kiosks and convenience stores islandwide have reported brisk sales of the blue butterfly-designed CashCard in the last three weeks.

Now, consumers pay a refundable deposit of $2 on each card, which has $5 in stored value.

But from May 1 , they will be charged a non-refundable $5 for the new orange laser-designed CashCards, bringing the card price to $10, inclusive of $5 in stored value.

Twenty of the 25 stores The Straits Times checked with reported a rise in the sale of blue CashCards.

A retail assistant at a Cheers outlet in Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3 said the store used to sell three to four CashCards a week, but now sells the same number every day.

At one 7-Eleven convenience store in the east, one customer even asked for 20 cards, but was allowed to buy only five, a limit set by the store.

Nets CashCard vice-president Yvonne Fong said that there are enough $7 CashCards to last at least till next month, and that if there are cards left over then, they would still be on sale, even after the new orange CashCards are introduced.

Still, shops are clearly having to restock more frequently, going by the experience of motorist Malcolm Wong, 50, who visited close to 10 shops in the Bedok and Paya Lebar areas over the past few weeks to buy more CashCards, but found that all had run out of stock.

He wanted to buy at least one more CashCard, he said.

'It's not worth paying $5 for the new card. I am getting more cards in case one card is faulty or runs out of funds,' he said.

Companies which own multiple vehicles are also stocking up.

Mr Jackson Tan, 37, who runs an air-conditioner servicing company with six commercial vehicles, bought four more CashCards to supplement the eight he already holds to 'save cost'.

Explaining the price increase, Nets' Ms Fong said local banks have absorbed the development and production costs of the cards for 12 years, to encourage the adoption of smart-card payments.

But with more than 4.5 million CashCards now in circulation, mainly among the 800,000 motorists who use them for parking and Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) charges, Nets feels that the smart-card culture has taken root, so charging is an option.

The Land Transport Authority-owned EZ-Link has charged $5 for its stored-value ez-link cards since November 2003.

Nets declined to comment on whether the move is related to EZ-Link's entry into the ERP market at the end of the year, when it will launch a new multi-use card that can be used for ERP payments too.

It means competition for Nets which, on its part, plans to carve out its own share in the transport sector with a Nets transit card.

Details on the new ez-link card will be available only later in the year, said the LTA.

Consumers Association of Singapore executive director Seah Seng Choon hopes that the impending competition from EZ-Link would eventually help push the cost of owning such CashCards down.

Not everyone is bothering with stocking up on cards, though, especially since they last for five years.

Finance manager Kee Sue Hwa, 38, said the increase also does not amount to much.

'It is not a sum large enough to warrant a rush to purchase the CashCards; I already have two cards,' she concluded.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on April 19, 2008.