The New Shopping Experience: Check In, Get Deals, Check Out

We've noted Shopkick before, but it bears taking another look now that it's live. Shopkick is a new mobile app that rewards users with “kickbucks” redeemable via gift certificates, music downloads and Facebook games. The smartphone app tracks and offers promotions to customers from the moment they enter a store to the cash register – and even in the fitting room.

Enter the store: gain points. Head to the dressing room at American Eagle to try on something – more points. Try out a tennis racquet at Sports Authority – match points!

It takes 1,250 kickbucks to earn a $5.00 American Eagle giftcard, but already retailers are considering upping the ante. Shopkick takes a small fee for each kickbuck earned, and a percentage of any sale resulting from using the app. In addition to the retailers, Shopkick can offer brands' coupons and promotions to shoppers.

In order to test the Shopkick model, company co-founder and CEO Cyriac Roeding (the former head of CBS Mobile), launched a non-profit app last year called CauseWorld. It tested consumer’s willingness to ‘check-in’ for charity – and the app was downloaded more than 550,000 times, raising nearly $1 million for charities.

The next obvious step: for-profit retail. “Why does no one ever reward anyone for visiting a store?” Roeding asks in a New York Times profile, noting that “foot traffic is so important.”

Much of the focus has been on e-commerce of late, but the reality is many consumers still shop in stores — so adding a virtual layer via a mobile app to customize and enhance the physical shopping experience offers added value to the shopper, and theoretically should increase loyalty.

To that end, Shopkick knows when a user physically enters the store premises as audio transmitters are picked up by the smartphone’s microphone. “It’s the first rewards program for desired behaviors,” Roeding says.

Shopkick's launch partners include Best Buy, Macy’s, Sports Authority, and American Eagle Outfitters, with more to come.

Best Buy is calling it a "location-based retail experiment" and will implement the mobile rewards system at more then 250 stores nationwide by October 1.

"We intend to explore ways we can use the power of location-based technology to personalize a Best Buy shopping experience, from check-in to check-out, with rewards and offers delivered right on a customer's smart phone," commented Matthew Smith, Best Buy's VP of marketing services.

Privacy advocates are already crying foul. Shopkick knows “where you are, what you buy, your spending habits, passions, excesses,” says the Center for Digital Democracy's Jeffrey Chester. “What appears to be a relatively harmless trade-off of your information for rewards or discounts is really misleading.”  

Roeding’s response: “The device does not detect your phone, the phone detects your device.” His logic: consumers opt to turn it on.

Intrusive or ingenious, it’s the tip of the iceberg of a not-so-distant future when retailers expect to advertise and promote items, offers and rewards based on where you live, your sex and age, and your frequency and habits of shopping.

Here's a look back at how Roeding envisioned Shopkick a year ago, in an interview with TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington: