The market has spoken. Getting a branded iPhone application live is becoming table stakes. The biggest retailers are already live, with many more in the pipe coming shortly as I am expecting a release rush before the holiday 2009 season begins. Many of these apps have already had numerous production releases which have continued to increase the usefulness of many of them. That is a great sign that these retailers are seeing real value in these apps, as they would not continue to refine them otherwise.
Below, we’ll explore in more detail the Best Buy, Sears (Sears2Go) and JCPenney (JCP) iPhone apps as they currently represent the “best of” the retail category.
As of this moment in time, this is the complete list of retail iPhone apps that are live.
The true product and deals centric retail iPhone app list today looks like:
- Sears
- Best Buy
- JCPenney
- Target
- Amazon
- Mastercard Priceless Picks (sort of, its a stretch as this spans)
There are a few other non-product and deal centric apps within retail which are:
- Macy*s
- Barnes & Noble
- Target Finder
- Wal-Mart
So if one was to try and find what’s in common with these three top retail iPhone apps, it would be:
- All have easy to use store locators
- All have some concepts of deals
- All have a variation of a shopping list (or a way of collecting items of interest)
Within these three featured apps, there are many other features, but these three (3) are the core basis of what I would suggest is the minimal marketable feature set for a retailer with a large store footprint.
Here is the Best Buy iPhone app broken down:
Main screen. Best looking overall for sure.
If a user wants to see "deals" they first need to narrow down what category of interest they want to view
Once a deal category is selected, a result set of appropriate deals are returned
Then a user can drill into a specific item of interest
All items can be added to this shopping list function called "Favorites" which is nothing more than a collection point for items of interest
The store locator is really simple and only brings up nearby locations to the user
And some basic store details are available with nice click to call and click to map buttons
Next up is the brand new JCPenney iPhone application:
The app immediately starts up and needs a user to interact with it by choosing a category of interest
This is the weirdest screen. Not a fan. This is a view that should be skipped and the user instead take to a list of relevant results
This is one of the nine deals Women's apparel deals. I missed the fact the first time that one can scroll left and right through all nine item results. Cool UI idea, just needs a stronger visual clue to help indicate that this interaction is possible
All items can also be added to this version of a shopping list, again called "Favorites"
The store locator is also very simple, with all of the details being forced up to this level. There is no store details page, but the push to call and push to map buttons are more prominent
Finally, here is the Sears iPhone app, branded Sears2Go exposed:
Nice home screen that balances some marketing messages and individual items
Within deals, it is a bit all over the place. Not a lot of organization of this content
If an deal item is clicked, then the longest item detail page (due to the mass amount of product related data that is being exposed) is brought up
The store sub-tab is straight forward and brings up a list of nearby stores
The store detail page by far has the most store level info available, but lacks a push to map button
It seems like the exception at this point, where I go through an entire day WITHOUT the mention of couponing in some form or another. It’s just that hot of a topic in the retail world. Whether its mobile couponing (like Coupious or Yowza or Cellfire or Coupon Sherpa) or digital paperless couponing (like Zavers or Zing) or print to redeem couponing (Coupons.com) or in-store shopping assistants (Modiv Media) or many, many others there is just so many choices.
With all of this buzz and the many possible manifestations that coupons are taking in the digital world, the ShopLocal team really found the below research from comScore particularly useful in trying to figure out which direction to go when offering guidance to our retailer clients. Basically if one believes that changing consumer behaviors is really hard if not impossible, or if it is possible takes a really long time, then inserting “clippable” or printable coupons withing the online weekly ad sites is the most natural fit. People are already doing this activity in the off line world, that transferring this activity should be a very natural fit (just as reading online newspaper ads / circulars has been a really great fit)
Note the leading response consumer gave in regards to the source of where they look to get coupons were the Sunday fliers (eg the weekly ads or circulars - all synonymous terms. This puts the SmartCircular sites that ShopLocal builds and hosts at the perfect sweet spot!
So aimed with this knowledge, Toys “R” Us is the latest retailer to begin to use it’s online “Sunday Flier” site as the consumer source for in-store promotional coupons as a tactic to drive increased in-store foot traffic and sales. As a nice fringe benefit, coupons do offer some level of web – to – store measurement.
So the ShopLocal team recently released a very simple and straight forward method of connecting the online circular content to a easily printed version of the coupons.
This is a circular browse page within the online Toys"R"Us weekly ad site. Note the coupon offer of "15% OFF" in the top left hand corner of the this back cover circular page.
Once a user clicks on the image of the coupon within the online SmartCircular site, the user's machine opens up a HiRes Adobe PDF version of the coupons that can easily be printed, saved and shared.
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.
Attention: Your feedback is needed. Your voice needs to be heard. Your input needs to be inserted.
Over the course of a few months, the delivery team here at ShopLocal embarked in a forward looking vision creation project of what an store promotions based Adobe AIR Desktop application might look like. There were many different ideas that were discussed and refine along the way, but in the end what won out was the below concept AIR desktop app. The cross-team collaboration was really high with Brendan Flynn (our resident Agile expert here at ShopLocal) helping lead the charge. All in all, I’m really excited to take the covers off this skunk works effort and get YOUR (yes, you there) feedback. The team wants to iterate and refine as we work to bring this new product line (part of the suite of SmartProducts) to market so make sure to leave a comment.
CLICK HERE To View The Complete Set Of Circular Based Adobe AIR Desktop Application Design Concepts
This is one of an overall series of design concepts of what a ShopLocal created Adobe AIR desktop application may look like. It would be single retailer focused app that a user would need to download and install on their local machine.
Some features that this Adobe AIR desktop app would include:
- Offline / online mode (don’t have to be connected to the internet to use)
- Version tracking (of the AIR application)
- User notification on the desktop (within the task bar area on a Windows machine for example)
- Update notification (to make sure that all users are getting the most up-to-date version of the app)
- One-click install and upgrade (so that this is REALLY easy for a user)
- Multiple browse modes including full screen and page scrolling (to make use of being outside the browser)
- New user interaction types (such as “category stacks”)
- Bonus buys (which would be online only exclusive content to help create a value proposition for why a user would download the desktop app and not just use their normal browser based version of the weekly ad)
- Drag and drop items to a drawer (interactive way of collecting items to a “list”)
- New concept for how an item detail page relates back to it’s underlying circular page
To see Hi-Res versions of all the various screen states that make up this AIR desktop app, just click the image to view the complete set over on Flickr
Sorry. I can’t help be excited. This dedicated article in the January 2009 issue of NRF Stores that covers my baby, PaperBoy – a localized rich media display ad product that pulls targeted in-store content – is exactly the the type of trade group / publication the team here has been diligently pursuing. It’s been a product that I’ve been creating / managing for nearly 3 years and its been so rewarding to see it grow in acceptance and market share. It’s always a great sign of confirmation that the product that you are offering is relevant and of high enough interest to catch the ears of such a top retail trade journal.
(4.50 out of 5)
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