Shopkick App Boosts Brick-&-Mortar Sales

By Alan Wolf -- TWICE, 1/31/2012

Palo Alto, Calif. - Shopkick, a location-based shopping app, said it helped drive $110 million in brick-and-mortar revenue last year.

The mobile program, which rewards shoppers with credits for walking into stores and interacting with products, has more than 3 million active users and partnerships with 11 national retailers, including Best Buy, Target and Toys "R" Us; several entertainment companies; and hundreds of products across dozens of brands.

"Some mobile services drive people out of stores ... with online comparison shopping that turn stores into ‘showrooms,'" said CEO Cyriac Roeding. "Shopkick does the opposite. [It] drives people into stores by rewarding them with things they love just for visiting."

The app provides high-value rewards to shoppers for entering stores by detecting a signal emitted from a patent-pending device located in each participating store and picked up by the microphone of the shopper's smartphone. The store then delivers rewards called "kicks" that can be collected at all participating partner store locations and redeemed for in-store gift cards, song downloads, movie tickets, Facebook credits, or donations to 30 different causes and charities.

Shopkick said its users interact with participating stores 150 million times per month, and that "scan missions" and other Shopkick programs encourage shoppers to pick up and interact with partner products. Shoppers are further rewarded when they make a purchase at a participating retail partner using their Visa debit or credit card as part of Visa's Buy & Collect program.

The app, launched in August 2010, is available for free from iTunes' App Store and on Google's Android Market.