The New Shopping Mall in your Cellphone
The shopping mall is going hi-tech. And it’s doing it in ways that would not have seemed obvious just a couple of years ago. A few years ago, it looked as if the only reason people went to a real store any longer was to enjoy the undergo of shopping. People loved the feeling of actually going out someplace and really viewing and feeling the merchandise, of seeing people and being seen. However, as industry observers saw it, this was a niche consumer group. Most people would like to save time and energy and simply shop on their computers. That Is not really how things played out. When, for example, Groupon announced a half-off coupon for use at Gap stores a year ago, half-million people signed on in just one day. It’s the new way that retail is developing nowadays. The retailers are attempting to reel customers back into the store by appealing to them over the Internet and over their phones.
Groupon, the flash-sale site, has hundreds of successful imitators also. They gain millions of customers into stores. Every big-box retailer is turning to smartphone technology to try to get buyers back into the store. A favored approach is typically to send offers instantly to customers’ phones. Of course, if they just send out offers to all phones in the city, that would be nothing better than spam. They have a much better way though: it’s called location-based marketing. Once location check-ins at services like FourSquare really catchon, retailers hope that they can log on, discover who happens to be within a 1-mile radius of their store and send offers directly to them and to no one else. The National Retail Federation believes that about half of all retailers in America will do this by the end of this year.
Lots of people these days, when they plan a trip to the shopping mall, go out with an extra bit of reassurance that they’ll find the best prices they can.
What they use to come by that reassurance is a new kind of smartphone app named ShopSavvy. What you do is, you go out to the shops, your window shop, or you amble along the aisles, until you discover something that interests you. You can fish out your phone, and take a picture of the barcode on the product. ShopSavvy searches its database for that product, determines every store, online or off that has that product, and gives you all the best prices in your area. You could find that Amazon has the same product far cheaper. It’s a way to merge the best of online shopping and off-line shopping at one go. Of course, the owners of stores may not like being victimized this way. Almost all the discount sales still happen in physical stores. And new apps like MobClix and ShopKick try to give shoppers a way to gain better info on the products they want while at the same time sticking around at the store. Apps like ShopItToMe make it possible for you to register an item that you are fascinated in with the app people and be notified when somebody somewhere discounts it. Obviously, these are all absolute new concepts. No single app really gives you everything that you want on one easy interface. However, these are truly evolving. Welcome to the new shopping mall in your cellphone.
