Earlier this month shopkick, the app that rewards you for walking into a store, surpassed 1 million users. Considering that the company had only 750,000 users at the end of January, that number is fairly significant. This also indicates the growing popularity of smartphone owners using the device while shopping.
Although services like foursquare are still more popular, shopkick appears to be catching on. The difference? Rather than relying on GPS, like foursquare does, retailers place a patent-pending device in the store. This device sends a signal to the users phone when they enter the store. This device, which costs retailers around $100, is more accurate than the traditional GPS model and ensures that a consumer is actually in the physical store.
Within the next two years, 24% of retailers surveyed by RIS News and IHL Group will sign up for shopkick or a similar service. This number is impressive until you compare that to the percentage who plan on signing up with foursquare or a similar service, which is 43%.
Although foursquare certainly seems to be the larger player (they added nearly 100,000 users at SXSW) shopkick may eventually overtake the market due to the accuracy issues of the GPS system. The fact of the matter is that the market is still rapidly growing and it is anyone's game at this point.
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