Shopkick: A Step Beyond Foursquare
News reached us this week that Simon Property Group has struck up a deal with iPhone development company shopkick. If that name sounds familiar, it might be because they’re responsibility for CauseWorld, an app we covered a while back. Soon, it might just be a household name.
Their upcoming app has a lot of features that you’d find in location-based retail apps like Foursquare. As a customer, you’ll pull out your iPhone (and likely your Blackberry or Android phone, in the near future) and “check in” at your current location. The retail location might give you access to a special discount or promotion for checking in. But then shopkick goes further. You’ll be rewarded with “kickbucks,” which you can save up for special rewards. You’ll also earn those kickbucks just for walking in to shopkick partner retailers.
That’s where the big difference lies. Shopkick won’t be a standalone app – rather, it relies on retailers adopting special beacons that recognize when shopkick users are in the store. So no more will you (or your retailers) need to worry that rewards are being tossed at shoppers who just pass by, or check in to every store from the local food court. Shopkick will reward shoppers who are already engaged, and it will keep them coming back by being more rewarding than Foursquare has ever thought to be.
Whether it will work remains to be seen. It’s an ambitious plan, and it needs retailers to get on board with the hardware if it’s going to reach its full potential. The jury is still out on whether there is enough use of this sort of app to make it worthwhile. But working with Simon is certainly a great start, and with 25 Simon malls launching the program later this month, we should be seeing real world results soon.
