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Shopkick goes live with Apple's iBeacon at Macy's

November 20, 2013

Shopping app shopkick announced that today it deploys the first Apple iBeacon-based presence signal at any major retailer. ShopBeacon transmitters are now live at Macy’s Herald Square, New York and Union Square, San Francisco. Now in closed beta, the trial is anticipated to go live to shopkick users within weeks.

As shoppers enter Macy’s, shopBeacon can remind those who’ve opted in to open their shopkick app, and in the future, will also deliver personalized value with department-level granularity. Building on Apple’s iBeacon, an iOS 7 Bluetooth Low Energy mobile protocol, shopBeacon adds encrypted signals to protect retailers and consumers, and complements it with shopkick’s other proprietary technologies for added accuracy and scale, the company said in a press release.

“IBeacon is a big milestone in creating the future of shopping, and it starts today with shopBeacon at Macy’s,” says Cyriac Roeding, CEO and co-founder of shopkick. “Our leading experience with presence technologies helped us create a retail-centric solution right in time for the holidays. After over a year in development, shopBeacon is here.”

ShopBeacon can welcome shoppers when they enter a Macy’s store and shows them location-specific deals, discounts, recommendations, and rewards, without the customer having to remember to open the app. It can also tie at-home browsing behavior to in-store benefit; if the customer “likes” a specific product online, if they so choose, shopBeacon can remind them when they enter the store that Macy’s sells it. Even better, in the future it can also deliver department-specific offers throughout the store — so favorite boots show up at the most useful time: in the shoe department.

The company said that shopBeacon requires minimal investment: It is installed simply by sticking the device on a wall or other flat surface, and each shopBeacon has a battery life of five years. The shopkick software developer kit also makes it easy to customize and further personalize the ways brands and retailers interact with shoppers through their own store apps using shopBeacon.

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