ShopAdvisor, a consumer shopping service that enables online comparison shopping right from the digital pages of a magazine, has 6 million users.
“Say you’re flipping through Cosmopolitan on your tablet,” explains Scott Cooper, ShopAdvisor’s CEO. You’ll see a small icon in the corner of the photo, he says, and a ShopAdvisor message will pop up, saying, “Here are the jeans Kim Kardashian is wearing and where they’re available,” along with the names of five retailers selling that clothing. You can then click right through to find the retailer selling the jeans in your size and at a price your are willing to pay.
Suddenly, the magazine is a sales platform.
Plus, by joining ShopAdvisor, you have told the application what you like, your size and what your are willing to pay, all of which are built into your personalized profile. Based on this information, ShopAdvisor will then send you occasional special offers.
But last fall, ShopAdvisor took its application into the Internet of Things. In a trial involving Levi Strauss & Co., Titan (a company that sells outdoor advertising space) , and beacon provider Gimbal, ShopAdvisor ran a program that sent special offers to the smartphones of ShopAdvisor users (who had their phone’s location-based services option and GPS radio turned on and beacon radio enabled) as they passed by one of 150 beacons installed on a Titan advertising kiosk near Levi’s stores, showing a Levi’s ad, or at the entrance to Levi’s retail stores in New York City and San Francisco. The trial lasted for five weeks during the late-summer back-to-school shopping season.
The push notifications included a coupon offering a 30 percent discount on anything in the store, Cooper says, along with directions to the store. To avoid overwhelming the user, the application limited the number of messages it delivered.
The trial’s results were quite positive, Cooper reports. While a 1 percent response rate is typical for GPS-based location-aware advertisements, 16 percent of the consumers who received the ShopAdvisor notice visited a Levi’s store. Recipients who also showed a preference for Levi’s products in their ShopAdvisor profiles visited the stores at a rate 2.6 times greater than those who did not have Levi’s products listed.
According to Cooper, the trial helped show that “the IoT is changing the game” for location-based systems. His company, he says, acts as a bridge for shoppers who use ShopAdvisor at home, while browsing through magazines, but also in stores, by linking the app to beacon deployments being launched by specific retailers or malls.
ShopAdvisor and Mobiquity Networks
ShopAdvisor works with Mobiquity Networks, a company that, through partnerships with mall operators, offers location-based mobile advertising services to retailers and brands. Rather than establishing a network of beacons only within the store’s four walls (or, more accurately, the three walls of the mall store), a retailer can work with Mobiquity Networks to engage with shoppers, even when they’re outside the store. That benefits the mall operators by helping to broaden consumers’ interest in the mall.
“Shoppers are more focused and are visiting fewer stores than they used to,” explains James Meckley, Mobiquity Networks’ CMO. They are also “being more savvy about what they shop for—they know what they want, and where they want to go. So we view our role in the ecosystem as providing retailers with that last opportunity to tap shoppers on the shoulder, and drive traffic to retailers that they might not be planning to visit.”
Mobiquity Networks has deployed beacons—which it sources from an undisclosed manufacturer—at 264 malls to date, Meckley says. It is also the exclusive beacon provider for U.S. malls owned by real estate developer Simon.
Mobiquity Networks provides retailers with a software development kit (SDK). With this SDK, the retailer (or its third-party app developer) enables Mobiquity Networks’ beacons installed throughout the mall’s common areas to issue alerts to the smartphones running that retailer’s shopping app, thereby reaching those individuals even if they are not inside the store. But most shoppers would not tolerate a handful of phone apps beeping at them as they walked through a mall, and many may disable some of the apps as a result. By working through ShopAdvisor as the third-party app developer, the retailer can extend its reach to customers in the mall via the ShopAdvisor app. And since ShopAdvisor would conceivably know that, say, this shopper is looking for jeans or a jacket that the retailer carriers, the notices that the shopper receives can be personalized.
Cooper asserts that as more consumers begin using beacon-based shopping apps, they are seeking a single clearinghouse where they can receive offers from all of their favorite brands, as well as make specific shopping lists. ShopAdvisor wants to be that single clearinghouse.
From Mobiquity Networks’ point of view, when retailers use ShopAdvisor to communicate with shoppers outside their stores, those consumers will be less likely to have to juggle multiple apps. This will keep customers happier, and that, in turn, will reflect well on the mall operator, which is Mobiquity Networks’ customer. Users can set preferences to receive or not receive emails and/or push notifications, both for price and availability alerts, as well as for offers and promotions.
“There is a fine line between providing value and annoying them,” Meckley explains, regarding his firm’s potential in enabling retailers to reach shoppers. “So ShopAdvisor is a natural partner for us.”