Retail Technology

Why are we not using mobile coupons yet?

I came across an interesting data set by TSYS, a payment processing company, relating to the consumer use of coupons, daily deals, and card-based rewards programs. For the purpose of this post, I want to focus on the coupon data. Turns out that coupons are still widely used with 83% of respondents using some form of coupon — this includes print and display. Also somewhat surprising is that the heaviest group of users is the 150k+ income bracket. In fact, 47% of high-income earners use coupons more than 50 times per year. So coupons still seem quite popular and the top three sources for coupons are, in order, newspaper, online, and store circular. What I found particularly interesting is that only 1 in 5 respondents source coupons on their mobile device, despite the pervasiveness of smartphones. According to Nielsen’s Feb 2014 Digital Consumer Report, over 66% of US consumers own a smartphone (source). Also, with the success of online coupon companies such as RetailMeNot (NASDAQ: SALE) and Coupons.com (NYSE: COUP), the logical next step would be the mobile device. See here for the full study.

Retail Store Tracking and Privacy

The Bull Case for Beacon

In the past year I’ve been hearing quite a bit about “Beacon” such as — Shopkick piloting its shopBeacon for in-store marketing, PayPal using their own beacon for hands-free check-ins and payments, and Qualcomm pushing its Gimbal SDK for developers.

Navigating the Retail Online to Offline Space

I've been tracking ~350 companies so far across 18 different categories in the Retail Online to Offline (O2O) space.  Here is how I've broken down the various startups: