Walk-In Rewards Go Nationwide; shopkick Partner Crate and Barrel Rolls Out Across the Country Sooner Than Anticipated

PALO ALTO, Calif., May 6, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Today shopkick, the largest location-based shopping app, announced that all Crate and Barrel locations across the U.S. will offer walk-in rewards and special deals to shoppers simply for visiting. For shoppers, that means shopkick walk-in rewards are now available in 39 states, plus Washington, DC and Puerto Rico, up from three states at launch in August, 2010.  

To celebrate the nationwide rollout, Crate and Barrel will quintuple walk-in kickbucks rewards on Friday, May 6 and Saturday, May 7.  Saturday also kicks off the company's new one-day Crazy Deal program which offers outstanding savings on a single, specially selected product.  In addition, Crate and Barrel will feature two-week exclusive shopkick offers, and continue to highlight other sale items and promotions within the application. The national rollout comes less than 5 months after Crate and Barrel initially launched its shopkick trial.

In addition to Crate and Barrel, shopkick's growing Partner Alliance includes Simon Property Group, The Sports Authority , west elm, American Eagle Outfitters, Best Buy, Macy's, Target, and The Wet Seal. Now nearly 1,500 large stores across multiple retailers and 160 of the country's largest malls have fully deployed shopkick's technology. In addition, more than 250,000 other stores across America reward shoppers for scanning products from leading brands, including HP, Intel, Kraft Foods, Procter & Gamble and Unilever.

Since last August, shopkick users have logged 1 million partner store walk-ins through the shopkick Signal – while walk-in rewards had limited distribution. They also checked in to stores with the GPS feature (for much fewer rewards) 200 million times, and have scanned 5 million partner products. The demand is exceeding already high hopes for shopkick.

"Seems like we just launched, and in that time shopkick has been growing like a weed: with more than 1.4 million users, it's the largest location-based shopping app now. That adoption helped us get to this national distribution a year earlier than we had hoped," said Cyriac Roeding, co-founder and CEO of shopkick. "For retailers, our technology proves we drive foot traffic, basket size and repeat visits.  It is a unique example where Internet technology is a blessing for brick and mortar stores. Shoppers love it. It's win-win-win. "

One of the accelerants for shopkick's growth is its demographic. The most recent user survey shows they're the ideal demographic for retailers: 55 percent are female, 49 percent are 25-39 years old and 92 percent are between 18 and 65 years old. The usage of shopkick is also impressive.  5-10 percent of shopkick users are active on a daily basis, 20 percent on a weekly basis and 40 percent on a monthly basis.  

The shopkick app, combined with the first walk-in location technology, the shopkick Signal – an inaudible sound emitted from a patent-pending device located in each participating retailer – verifies a user is in-store, and then rewards them for visiting in the form of a currency called kickbucks. Verifying presence in-store assures retail partners that the marketing dollars input to the shopkick program are being spent to reward customers who are actually inside the store, something not possible with traditional location-based applications because they rely on GPS technology that has an error radius of typically 500 yards on mobile phones when apps are first started.

Kickbucks can be collected at all partner stores and redeemed for in-store gift card rewards, song downloads, movie tickets and hotel vouchers, Facebook Credits to purchase Facebook Deals or play games online, donations to 30 different causes and charities and more. And, because the detection occurs on the user's mobile device, the privacy of presence information is completely under the user's control.

The shopkick app is available for free on the iPhone and on Android. Apple users can download it from the App Store or at http://itunes.apple.com/app/id383298204 and on the Android Market at www.shopkick.com/download.

About shopkick (www.shopkick.com)

shopkick, Inc. is a Palo Alto-based startup funded by Kleiner Perkins' iFund, Greylock Partners and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, and investor in Facebook and Zynga. In August 2010, shopkick launched the first mobile application that hands consumers high-value rewards, offers and exclusive deals at shopkick's national retail partners simply for walking into nearly 1,500 stores and malls. Even more rewards can be earned for scanning partner brand products at over 250,000 stores nationwide or checking in at more than 3 million businesses nationally. In combination with a groundbreaking new location technology called 'shopkick Signal,' the app can verify location within feet, and because the detection occurs on the phone, privacy of presence information is completely in the users' control. Shopkick's growing partner alliance includes Best Buy, Macy's, Target, American Eagle, Crate and Barrel, The Sports Authority, west elm, Wet Seal, Simon Property Group, Kraft Foods, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Intel and HP. shopkick  is the only 100% performance-based marketing platform in the physical retail world, with measurable foot traffic and transactions at stores. The shopkick app rose to the top of the Apple App Store and the Android Market amongst 350,000 applications, and became the largest location-based shopping app in America, after reaching 1 million users within a record six months after launch.

SOURCE shopkick

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