The wait is over. The Kohl’s Weekly Ad & Store Finder iPhone / iPod Touch application is now live within the Apple iTunes App Store. The ShopLocal team has been working on this for months and it’s great to finally get this live for the general public (thanks Apple for working the weekend and pushing this live last Saturday 10/31).
The team is also excited to see that a good chunk of people have already downloaded the app, given that no promotion has occurred yet, including a few outside of the U.S. (not sure why though?). It will be fun to see this app’s download footprint grow in the coming days, especial within the crowded Lifestyles iTunes app category. It’s one of those things that you really don’t exactly know how your baby (um, I mean app) will be received by the world.
It’s a free download so please download and check it out. Tell us what you think by leaving feedback within iTunes or rating the app there as well.
Available now, the free Kohl's Weekly Ad & Store Finder application
Within this iPhone app, there are four main features and content views which are browse by:
- Weekly Ad Page: Users can browse through all the active weekly ads for their current store location and then can select a specific promotion to view all of the circular pages one at a time
- Brands: App users can filter all of the current on sale deals by a specific brand such as Nike or Dockers
- Categories (called Offers in the app): Allows consumers to select a specific category of interest such as Girl’s Shoes and to only view those applicable deals that are live right now for their current store location
- Nearby Kohl’s Store Locations: Shoppers can use their current location to pull up a list of Kohl’s stores that are close by, as well as directly call the local store or view the store’s location within a Google map
Here is a collage of many of the different views and slices of weekly ad content that is exposed by this native iPhone app that is built around the best local deals that are available at local Kohl's stores across the U.S.
Wow. Since initially covering this topic back in December of 2008 when only Target and Walk-Mart had a mobile site live, and then a few weeks later Toys “R” Us joined the mobile web party, a lot has happened. As of today, I was able to spot a total of twelve (12) live retail mobile web / mobile optimized sites live:
- Staples
- Office Depot
- CVS / pharmacy
- Walgreen’s (also a second, newer, more complete mobile version is available)
- Sears
- Kmart
- Best Buy
- Ritz Camera
- Toys “R” Us
- Wal-Mart
- Target
- Albertsons
Here are a few observations in aggregate of all these mobile versions of retail.com sites:
- m.retailer.com VS. retailer.mobi There does seem to be a split on this front where some retailers are using a subdomain (m) and others are going out and buying a .mobi version of their typical dot com domain
- There are some domain name squatters out there that are buying up retailer.mobi domain names. Lowes.mobi is a great example
- All but three retailers (Ritz Camera, Albertsons & Toys “R” Us) include a simple store finder within the mobile version of their site
- A good chunk of these sites are bringing in online weekly ad / circular content. Good examples would be the mobile sites for Target, Toys “R” Us, Sears and Kmart
- The richness of content made available within these sites is greatly variable
- One easy way to find out if there is a mobile version of any site is to run a quick search in Google on only the mobile web sites. By using this somewhat hidden Google feature, one can quickly see what sort
- Mobile transformation (MT) seems to be one of the main ways being used by retailers to quickly get their regular version of their dot com site “optimized” for mobile devices
- Only really the big name players in retail have deployed special mobile ready versions of their main site at this point in time
- Nearly all of these sites were built using a ‘liquid’ frameset that is very stretchy so as to easily adjust to any mobile device screen size
Here is a visual archive of all of the home pages of these mobile friendly retail web sites:
Staples - has all the key content of hot deals, store locations and weekly ad deals
Office Depot - one of the simplest but most effective UI designs
CVS / pharmacy - got all of the basics and nothing else
Walgreens - rather lacking in functionality (older mobile version)
Here is the newer, more complete mobile version that does now include the weekly ad content
Sears - a very overwhelming amount of links and choices
Kmart - nice clone of Sears that has the same busyness issue
Best Buy - fairly robust site with good prioritization of search and store finder
Ritz Camera - like the deal of the day product which helps immediately drive home what this site is all about
Toys"R" Us - would like to see all of the content contained within separate child pages, rather than all dumped into one single page
Wal-Mart - lacking in content
Target - very rich content and great UI/UX. It's Target, so I expect nothing less
Albertsons - sort of a confusing site as it appears to be targeted to heavy users that buy online and pick up in-store
Yet again, the physical retail store is where it is at! With on average 95.5% of of all retail sales being attributes to in-store purchases, the importance of the store is firmly cemented (Note that this metric was created by only assessing only ShopLocal top tier clients). People are researching online, but NOT buying online. Bricks and mortars are here to stay.
In case the details are desired, here is the complete data set (in Excel 2007 – .xlsx format) for further analysis which was directly sourced from Internet Retailer and was the estimated eCommerce revenue per retailer for 2008. The chart below is directly taken from this analysis. Also note that there are still some big name retailers that do not yet have eCommerce enabled web sites such as:
- Canadian Tire
- Michael’s
- Pep Boys
- ShopKo
With the exception of the office supply retailers (OfficeMax, Office Depot & Staples), notice how relatively small of a factor these retailer's online web sites are in overall sales. The store is still where on average 95.5% of the transactions take place.
P.S. Thanks Loch for doing this interesting analysis.
The possibilities of distribution points for weekly ad content continues to increase. Today two versions of the same core weekly ad application went live for Target. These apps were built to live on user’s start / homepages that iGoogle and My Yahoo! pretty much have a monopoly on. Specifically the two apps that went live were for:
Here is what the two apps look like in their native state once they have been “installed” within a user’s personalized homepage (Note that all throughout this post I use the word ‘install’ very loosely. What I am trying to refer to is the process of allowing and adding these apps/gadgets to a user’s homepage. No real code is actually being installed on a user’s local machine):
This is how the My Yahoo! open app appears on a user's homepage in its native 'small' state
The iGoogle gadget and how is appears on a user's homepage in it's native 'un-expanded' state
Here is what each app looks like once a user chooses to expand them to the ‘large’ view:
This is how the My Yahoo! open app appears in its "expanded" state
This is how the iGoogle gadget appears in its "expanded" state
So now for a quick comparison of these two competing platforms:
- My Yahoo!
- A much more complicated ‘install’ process that involves up to three different clicks, compared to the one (1) click ‘install’ on iGoogle. Yes, Yahoo! Open Apps allow for more user driven privacy controls and a great degree of social features, so these come at a cost of a more involved ‘installation’ process
- The “full” or “expanded” view of the app can be built in Adobe Flash / Flex, which in this case the Target app is. This just opens up the door to a richer, more engaging user experience
- The “full” or “expanded” view has some graphical display ads wrapped around the content. I happened to catch one ad with some layering / shine-through issues going on that was interfering with the right hand part of the app
- By default, it appears that the Target Open app within My Yahoo! is setup to auto opt-in all users into the below two (2) types of communications. Great for the marketer, but maybe not so great for the unknowing consumer:
- iGoogle
- Within the native, non-expanded view, the gadget gets cut-off. This looks sort of odd and is a bummer since this is the view state that most users will see the vast majority of the time
- Built using light, fast and universal coding languages such as HTML, Javascript and DHTML
- Since it is not built in flash, in this case a much deeper integration is exposed at the item detail page that pulls in an Amazon.com hosted layer that brings in all sorts of rich functionality like local inventory look up, one-click add to cart, add to lists, ratings and reviews
- If a user decides to ’share’ the app with friends, within iGoogle the app makes some useful suggestions as to which friends of yours you might consider based upon your emailing habits within Gmail. With Yahoo!, this is just one big blank box that is nowhere as user friendly
Here is a complete set of production screen grabs of the widgets from both iGoogle and My Yahoo! posted up on Flickr just in case. Finally, a bit of well deserved recognition to the Target and AKQA teams that did all of the heavy lifting to get these fairly complex apps launched.
What in the world does:
- Store Coupons
- Local Inventory
- Store Events & Announcements
- 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.
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