Coupons + Local Inventory + Store Events + Local Promotions = The New Shopper Planning Center Concept

Posted on 22 June 2009 by Patrick Flanagan No Comments

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What in the world does:

1. Store Coupons
2. Local Inventory
3. Store Events & Announcements
4. Local Promotions

have in common?  They are all all local store focused and represent the complete set of resources that would help any in-market shopper.  Collectively over the last few months, the team here at ShopLocal has been doing a lot of thinking and discussing where the future of our business is headed.  One of the most immediate conclusions is that we need diversify our business well beyond the current focus area of circulars and catalogs. There will be a day were no print circular is created and inserted into newspapers. This is not an immediate threat or doomsday scenario, but just prudent long-term preparedness.

So once the focus is off the circular, our team immediately turned to bring other great store focused sources of content to a more visible nature.  Areas like store-level closeouts, coupons and  in-store events are just a few examples.  The point being, ShopLocal quickly is evolving to become a store focused, promotion based marketing tool, of which the weekly ad / circular content is just one source.  This concept is what the team is calling a Shopper Planning Center (working name – still on the hunt for something better – maybe SmartDeals? Suggestions welcome…)

The goals of what a Shopper Planning Center can do for a retailer are:

• Deepen the amount of location specific content by bringing in promotional data from sources that have no current outlet of home on the internet (including retailer.com)
• Become more multi-channel in terms of offering items available for sale online
• Manage all of this increased volume of content by the use of data driven features such as site personalization, product recommendation and related products
• Do all of this so as to increase local, in-store conversions that are fueled by online research and activities

This is a list of some of the potential content / data sources that a retailer could easily load into the Shopper Planning Center.

So the team here at ShopLocal took this vision of a retailer store-centric deal center (or Shopper Planning Center) and came up with two initial visual manifestations.

Here is a Borders Books "Magic Shelf" inspired visualization that the team did for Kohl's of how many unique content sources can be well integrated into an engaging user experience / interface (Ux /Ui). This entire site would be built as a rich internet application (RIA) so that user could pan up, down, left and right to view the various result sets.

Here is a low fidelity wire frame that was done for Best Buy that does a great job of showing how store event content and eCommerce content and weekly ad content can be pulled together with personalization and localization.