Crate & Barrel signs on with shopkick for mobile rewards

New York -Crate and Barrel has joined shopkick, allowing it to deliver location-based shopping rewards simply for visiting stores. By early 2011, rewards will be delivered at all U.S. Crate and Barrel stores.

Crate and Barrel is the first shopkick retail partner who signed on for nationwide rollout of the program right from the beginning. This Saturday, December 18, in time for holiday shopping, Crate and Barrel shoppers can start earning rewards and offers at all Crate and Barrel stores in the greater Chicago and New York metropolitan areas, simply by walking in with the shopkick app on their smartphones.

Within weeks, shopkick will be live in all Crate and Barrel locations nationwide, with complete rollout expected by February 2011.

"shopkick starts a dialogue with our shoppers right when they walk in, turning our stores into interactive worlds,m " said Sascha Bopp, COO of Crate and Barrel. "We can now reward our customers just for coming to see us, and are excited to explore additional ways to interact with them on their smartphones through the shopkick app."

The shopkick app detects a shopkick Signal, emitted from a patent-pending device, located in each participating store, to deliver rewards called "kickbucks" to each user. kickbucks can be collected at all partner stores and redeemed for in-store gift card rewards or discounts at top retail stores, or song downloads, or movie tickets and hotel vouchers, Facebook Credits to play games online, donations to 30 different causes and charities and more. And, because the detection occurs on the user's mobile device, the privacy of presence information is completely under the user's control.