14 DAY TRIAL // Major retailer Best Buy has just announced the availability of its shopkick location-based application for customers with smartphones.
Users of the application will be provided with various rewards and exclusive offers by downloading it and simply for walking into any of the 1,300 Best Buy and Best Buy Mobile stores nationwide.
The partnership between the two companies will provide an engaging experience for customers through targeted offers and rewards on a national scale.
“Our customers are always on the go and are increasingly looking for tools that fit into their daily lives to make shopping easier. Through our partnership with shopkick, we can provide these experiences when they want them,” said Drew Panayiotou, senior vice president, marketing, Best Buy.
Based on the “walk-in” location technology, the application emits a shopkick Signal, an inaudible sound emitted from a patent-pending device located in each participating retailer, which verifies a user is in-store, and then rewards them for visiting in the form of a currency called “kicks”.
As soon as the verifying process is successfully completed, the customers who are inside the store are rewarded marketing dollars to their shopkick program.
According to shopkick, this process is not possible with traditional location-based “check-in apps,” due to an error radius.
“We believe Best Buy, one of our original launch partners, deciding to go nationwide faster than expected demonstrates shopkick can work for retailers. We hope this will be another accelerator for shopkick's growth,” said Cyriac Roeding, CEO and co-founder of shopkick, Inc.
shopkick was initially launched in August 2010 in 257 stores, but only recently the retailer made it available nationwide, in its 1,296 stores.
The application is available as a free download for Android and iPhone users from Android Market, App Store or by texting “shopkick” to 332211.