Offline to Online: Shopkick

After the launch of ‘Foursquare’, check-in is an essential for LBS. It provides entertainment to users and connects offline activities to online services. But because of uncomfortable process from launching an application to pushing a check-in button, it has not lasted that long. These services require more energy and participation from users.

But ‘shopkick’ is different. This service has several strong points which differentiates it from other services.

One thing is that shopkick allures a user to purchase a product through a promotional event or special information. And shopkick uses a very unique solution to check-in automatically and gives a shopping information. I don’t know its patent and technology for automatic check-in. Scrutinizing articles, the unique solution seems to be related with a SoundCode. FYI, SoundCode is an audio encoding and decoding technology to convert audio signals from one format to another (Source: Wikipedia).

The other thing is that shopkick is made as a marketing tool. It enables shopkick to generate revenue and expand to other business areas (e.g. zone-based advertisement which are not focused on an in-store solution). So it is well connected to various types of legacy infra such as POS system. A shopkicker can get a product information using barcode-scanning. And when buying a product under promotion, customers only release their phone number to a casher as an authentication method.

In spite of the two strong points, some experts say that shopkick might be in peril because of NFC. But I think NFC is not a substitution but a supplement. And besides, NFC needs at least one or two years to reach to a minimum level of infrastructure. Anyway, shopkick goes well by far and it has a clear direction towards success.