August marks Shopkick’s 9th birthday, and to celebrate, we’re taking a look back on all that we’ve accomplished in the past year. 

We’ve grown quite a bit since our last birthday, and have rolled out a bunch of new features that elevate the shopping experience for our users and drive engagement and sales for our partners.

2D image recognition: We continue to see success with our barcode scanning feature which uniquely drives a consumer to a product in store and places the product directly in shoppers’ hands. This year, we’ve taken this concept one step further with the launch of 2D image recognition. This new feature enhances the traditional barcode scan by recognizing product or packaging elements to support campaign objectives such as highlighting nutritional information, competitive differentiation, or packaging re-designs. This feature draws our users’ attention to unique and differentiating product features and further rewards and drives conversion while the product is still in hand. For brands, 2D image recognition takes scanning to the next level by emphasizing key features and boosting consumer awareness and interest.

In Store Video: Since introducing video content in the app for users to browse from anywhere at anytime, we’ve seen immense success and have grasped consumer attention. This year, we’ve combined engaging video content with our location-based technology to offer two new exciting in-store video products.

• Storefront video: Building upon our own-the-trip feature, we introduced Storefront Video to the Shopkick app. Storefront Video is a unique and premium mobile video offering where upon walking into a store, customers are rewarded with kicks sponsored by a given brand, and are further rewarded for the completion of an anchored video. This feature can be a powerful tool to drive in-store awareness as Shopkick has seen a 91% average video completion rate as opposed to the 39% mobile app industry average. This unique in-store video takeover puts brands top of mind during the store trip, leading to increased awareness, product engagements and sales during the key moment of purchase decision.
• Post-scan video: To further incentivize and engage our audience, we capitalized on the growing demand for video content and launched a post-scan video feature. After scanning a product, post-scan video gives shoppers the ability to unlock a branded video, and earn kicks for watching. This feature presents an incredible opportunity for brands to further engage and educate shoppers at shelf, to build brand equity, and to communicate key product benefits at the very moment of purchase decision. Post-scan video allows brands to deliver key marketing messages, recipe or influencer content, and ultimately guide consumers to purchase while the product is still in their hands.

Programmatic video: Shopkick’s new programmatic video product offers premium mobile video in a guaranteed shopping environment, and ensures strong engagement and high video completion rates with qualified shoppers while they are at home in the product discovery phase or looking for some inspiration. With user data and real time bidding, we’re giving our partners more control over where, when, and at what price they’re buying inventory, and our users daily kick-earning opportunities to engage with new brands.

Mobile commerce: Our vision is, and always has been to reward users along every step of their shopping journey. So when consumer shopping habits evolved and became more mobile-oriented, so did Shopkick. Since our last birthday, Shopkick launched a widely successful mobile commerce feature which rewards users for their online purchases, allowing businesses to reach consumers across even more touchpoints. Through this feature, Shopkick has provided new ways to facilitate discovery, build awareness, encourage consideration, and drive engagement for major online retailers including Amazon, Jet, eBay, Walmart, and many more. For brands, we offer product level Elevated Kicks for Purchase, driving an increase in orders and helping our partners stand out in the incredibly cluttered (80mm+ SKUs!) Walmart.com environment.

Updated user interface: In the past year, we’ve improved our app design to make the user experience as seamless as possible, and ensuring branded content is better organized and easily viewable. Our updated design has significantly simplified our user experience, categorizing branded content into groups like fashion, home, health and beauty. This improvement has made it much easier for users to discover new content, and allows them to navigate categories that are relevant to their lives and personal shopping habits.