Shopkick is a new smartphone app that tracks customers through their phones with a degree of accuracy that determines whether you are window-shopping outside, browsing items or in the change rooms and offers incentives accordingly. For example, if you are walking by you are enticed to enter with the offer of kickbucks (points you accumulate to get kickbucks, redeemable for gift cards, music or Facebook game credits). If you decide to try an item of clothing on you have the option of swiping your device over posters which offer further discounts. So far, American brands Macy’s, Best Buy, American Eagle Outfitters and Simon Property Group have all partnered with the service. Best Buy have gone a step further by integrating the service with their pre-existing customer reward numbers. Ostensibly this is so they can offer personalised, targeted offers to customers, but it also offers the potential to layer the two sources of data and develop rich consumer behaviour records.
Kickback differs from other geosocial services like Foursquare in the sense that it is a passive checkin application – you don’t opt to state that you are in a certain store, it does that for you. It will be interesting to see how Shopkick progresses, especially in light of Foursquare’s active perusal of retail partnerships to offer discount incentives to users. Will Shopkick’s passive checkin ability make it the digital shopper’s app of choice or will people find it too intrusive?
