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New mobile applications enable customers to scan the bar codes of products in a retail outlet and get competitive prices and other information using their mobile phone. As a consumer, that’s great — but as a retailer, such applications may drive customers from your store.
A new company, founded in France but with its executives and development in Winchester, aims to change that. StoreXperience Inc. is developing a mobile application that acts as a mobile personal shopper, allowing retailers to provide information and offer promotions to customers while they’re in the store, using a phone’s camera to scan product bar codes.
The application has been in beta testing for a year, but recently attracted the attention of Jim Levinger, the CEO of Concord-based NextCode Inc. and founder and former CEO of mobile marketing applications developer PixelDance Communications Inc., which merged with Watertown’s Lavastorm Inc. in 2000. While NextCode, which makes bar code identification technologies for mobile phones, is still in operation, Levinger has signed on as StoreXperience’s vice president of business development.
“It was something we had been thinking about (at NextCode), but StoreXperience already had an application up and running,” he said.
Competitive price-comparison applications, such as Shop Savvy (built by Texas-based Big in Japan Inc.) and Slifter (by GPShopper LLC of New York) incorporate bar code scanning for price comparisons, but send in-store users to online outlets or other vendors.
“The only place where CRM (customer resource management) doesn’t really have a presence is in-store,” said StoreXperience CEO François Silvain. “And those systems that are there are point-of-purchase systems that happen at the end of a visit and are aimed at bringing a customer back.”
StoreXperience has a handful of deployments behind it, including its use as part of a silent auction held for the National Retail Foundation, but it has yet to be rolled out to consumers on a large scale.
While StoreXperience falls into the mobile marketing bucket with a number of other local companies such as Jittergram Inc. of Bedford, N.H., or Adva Mobile Corp. of Wayland, the company’s target audiences — retailers and in-store shoppers — are more closely related to those of Quincy-based Modiv Media Inc.
Modiv Media has developed an in-store shopping “media network” that allows users to traverse the aisles of a store and scan products as they buy, using a store-owned device, and has placed product in a number of grocery stores, including Stop & Shop Supermarkets and Roche Bros. Paul Schaut, CEO of Modiv Media, said that while StoreXperience is playing in a very crowded market, getting value out of in-store decisions is something in which retailers and brands are very interested.
“What we’ve found is that when you’re in the aisle, you are at the ultimate point of influence and if you can find a way for someone to look at their screen during that moment, that’s nirvana,” he said.
He also added that StoreXperience may have a better reception in higher-end stores, such as electronics retailers, where price comparisons and background information are more integral than in supermarkets. That, said Levinger, is an area StoreXperience intends to pursue.
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