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Opportunity Notes

By Rafe Needleman

Reclaiming Brick and Mortar

Service |

Audio version

Shoppin’ Pal brings smartphone purchasing to boutique retail stores.

I am a jerk. I use physical retail stores as showcases for Amazon. In a store, I scan products I’m interested in with the Amazon iOS app, and if the price is good, I’ll buy the product online, then and there.

When it comes to boutiques like independent bookstores, I feel terrible about this, so I also try to actually buy things in stores. But, honestly, most of the time I don’t.

Fermyon’s Shoppin’ Pal app is one effort to bring an Amazon app experience to shoppers at boutiques, and to help stores get some of their lost-to-online revenue back.

It sounds like a useful app and it’s a good demo. When you scan the barcode of an item on a shelf, you get data about it, provided by the store. You might also see an “other buyers liked” list. You might even be able to complete the purchase in the app, just like you do at an Apple store if you’re using that company’s retail app.

Also, in-app special deals can help convince shoppers to buy what they’re seeing, instead of firing up Amazon.

Store owners get not just more sales and electronic receipts, but logs of what users scanned and didn’t buy. If the data gets mashed up with data from users’ visits to other stores that use the app, the analytics get even more interesting.

Amazon’s mobile apps have done a number on retail. It would be good to see boutiques get an app to fight back.

- Rafe

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  • http://www.robodance.com/ roschler

    I wonder if any stores have just gone the other direction and put in-store Web terminals on every isle that look up the item on Amazon for the customer, like the price or stock check terminals some stores have. The terminal would have a big banner next to it that says Check Amazon’s price, and then allows the user to complete the purchase right there on the store’s embedded terminal. At least they could earn an affiliate commission by signing up for an Amazon affiliate account. If they were smart, they would create their own Web store front that uses the Amazon API. Then when a user does this, right before they add the item to the user’s Amazon cart for them, they could point out the store’s superior warranty policy, shipping charges saved (if the user is not Amazon prime), extra discounts or perks the user will lose if they ship at Amazon, etc. They could also use this as an opportunity to up-sell/cross-sell the user on impulse buys that Amazon does not carry.

    At the very least they get a ton of information about the user’s shopping habits, and as you say, get information on item sales that they lost to Amazon (but at least got an affiliate commission on). They could even adjust their inventories to eliminate the items that Amazon snatches from them. However, that final tactic could backfire if those items are really “loss-leaders” that generate other business. They might even find out that for some low-margin items, it’s worth it just to keep a few shelf items in the store just to get the Amazon commission and up-sell/cross-sell sales!

  • tbetz

    Too bad it’s IOS-only.

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