Beacons to get a boost from tech partnership

ShopperTrak is teaming up with a shopping app called Shopkick to enhance the value proposition retailers offer to their customers in-store.

ShopperTrak, a global provider of consumer behavior insights and location-based analytics, and Shopkick is the most widely used real-world shopping app. Their partnership aims to leverage the market leadership and experience of both companies to deliver superior in-store experiences and rewards for shoppers, while also providing the retail community with an analytics tool to optimize the shopper’s experience in the store.

“With ever-changing mobile technologies, the shopping experience is evolving rapidly,” said ShopperTrak CPO Chetan Ghai. “Shopkick is at the forefront of retail mobile technology and was the first to recognize the importance of shopper engagement throughout the path to purchase. With this partnership, the Shopkick app and beacon technology will serve as yet another avenue to enhance the shopper experience via mobile technology, and an effective way to increase shopper traffic, conversion rates and average transaction size.”

The partnership combines ShopperTrak’s extensive portfolio of the world’s leading retailers and robust product suite with shopkick’s shopBeacon hardware. The shopBeacons give the retailer access to both their own app users as well as the Shopkick app, which is used by more than 10 million shoppers, to increase traffic, conversion rates and average transaction size.

By integrating ShopperTrak interior analytics solution with Shopkick’s in-store beacon technology, the companies will provide retail customers with actionable and anonymized in-store analytics, allowing them to understand in-store shopper behavior, including where customers are going and how long they are staying. This analytical insight enables retailers to shift in-store strategies and operations to match shopper interest and behavior, leading to increased customer loyalty.

Additionally, retailers can utilize the shopBeacon network to engage with customers through their own apps, gain rich insight into consumer behavior and, most importantly, deliver more rewarding and convenient consumer shopping experiences.

Shopkick’s shopBeacons, which are already deployed at more than 8,000 large stores, including Macy’s and American Eagle, welcome shoppers entering a store via mobile alerts and share location-specific deals, discounts, recommendations, and rewards (called kicks) –- all as you enter the store’s front door. The Shopkick app can also tie at-home browsing to in-store benefits— if a shopper “likes” a specific product in the app, shopBeacon reminds her when she enters the store that sells it. ShopBeacons have a five-year battery lifecycle, and have fully encrypted signals.

“Shopkick has a vision to provide the digital layer on the physical world of retail. We have always been at the forefront of how mobile technology can enable great shopping experiences in-store. We were the first to install beacons with BLE at a major national retailer in 2013, and currently have the largest, most robust network of beacons deployed,” said Alexis Rask, CRO, Shopkick. “We see this partnership with ShopperTrak as a way to scale and enhance our value proposition by providing our users with access to even more stores. We want to be the most convenient, all-in-one shopping app for our users, improving their overall trip each time.”

The solution is being beta-tested with retail customers now. It will be available to all retailers later this year.