Shopkick App to Reward You for Visiting a Store
Shopkick, a new location-based shopping app for iPhone that rewards shoppers just for visiting stores, is now available on the App Store. Launched Tuesday with an event at the American Eagle Outfitters flagship store in Times Square, the app allows shoppers to start earning rewards by visiting retailers.
In addition to American Eagle Outfitters, the launch partners include Best Buy, Macy’s, Simon Property Group, and The Sports Authority.
Rewards and offers are live now in all partner store locations in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and will kick-off in Chicago and other cities in the coming weeks.
Rewards will be delivered simply for walking into participating stores with the shopkick app open. Within the next four weeks, more than 600 individual stores and 100 leading malls will participate.
In addition, at thousands of other stores across America, smaller rewards will be offered for “checking in” and for scanning products.
The app detects a “shopkick Signal” coming from the shopkick device located in each participating store, and because the detection occurs on the user’s iPhone, the privacy of presence information is completely under the user’s control.
Once a shopkick Signal is detected, the app delivers reward points called “kickbucks” to the user simply for walking through the door. And kickbucks can be collected across all partner stores.
Other shopper-related features of the shopkick app include:
- Collect kickbucks for trying on clothes and scanning a barcode in the American Eagle Outfitters dressing room
- Receive special offers, for example, a discount on specific products at Macy’s, or in a particular Macy’s department
- Get more kickbucks for scanning and learning about products and services at Best Buy
- Receive special offers for trying featured products at Sports Authority, and get extra kickbucks again
- Earn kickbucks from every retailer and redeem them at any partner retailer
The kickbucks can be redeemed, with one touch, for Facebook Credits to play games online, song downloads, in-store gift card rewards at shopkick partner stores, magazine subscriptions, iPods, and even donations to 30 different causes and charities.
The shopkick app is available for free from the App Store on iPhone or from http://www.itunes.com/AppStore/.
Shopkick is a new Palo Alto-based startup. It works to bring mobile internet to the retail experience.
