The New Shoping Mall in your Cellphone

The shoping mall is going high-tech. And it's doing it in ways that wouldn't have seemed obvious just a few years ago. A couple of years ago, it seemed as if the only reason people went to a real store anymore was to enjoy the experience of shopping. People loved the feeling of actually going out somewhere and actually looking at and feeling the merchandise, of seeing people and being seen. But as industry observers saw it, this was a niche consumer group. Most people prefer to save time and energy and just shop on their computers. That isn't really how things played out. When for instance, Groupon announced a half-off coupon for use at Gap stores a year ago, a half million people signed on in just one day. It's the new way that retail is developing today. The retailers are trying to reel customers back into the store by appealing to them over the Internet and over their phones.

Groupon, the flash-sale site, has hundreds of successful imitators too. The bring in millions of customers into stores. Every big-box retailer is turning to smartphone technology to try to bring customers back into the store. A favored approach is usually to send offers directly to customers' phones. Of course, if they just send out offers to every phone in the city, that would be nothing better than spam. They have a much better way though: it's called location-based marketing. Once location check-ins at services like FourSquare really catch on, retailers hope that they can log on, find out who happens to be within a 1-mile radius of their store and send offers directly to them and to no one else. The National Retail Federation believes that about half of all retailers in America will do this by the end of this year.

Lots of people these days, when they plan a trip to the shoping mall, go out with an extra bit of reassurance that they'll find the best prices they can. What they use to come by that reassurance is a new kind of smartphone app called ShopSavvy. What you do is, you go out to the shops, you window shop or you amble along the aisles, until you find something that interests you. You can fish out your phone, and take a picture of the barcode on the product. ShopSavvy searches its database for that product, finds every store, online or off that has that product, and gives you all the best prices in your area. You might find that Amazon has the same product far cheaper. It's a way to combine the best of online shopping and off-line shopping at one go. Of course, the owners of stores may not like being used this way. Almost all the discount sales still occur in physical stores. And new apps like MobClix and ShopKick try to give shoppers a way to gain better information on the products they want while still staying at the store. Apps like ShopItToMe make it possible for you to register an item that you're interested in with the app people and be notified when someone somewhere discounts it. Of course, these are all very new concepts. No a single app really gives you everything that you want on one easy interface. But these are really evolving. Welcome to the new shopping mall in your cellphone.

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