Shopkick Brings In-Store Mobile Coupons To Android Phones

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

Fresh off a partnership with Target, Shopkick is bringing its geo-coupon system to Android phones with a free app. Now Android users can access in-store coupons from Best Buy, Macy’s, Target, American Eagle, Sports Authority and more.

Instead of checking in, as you would with a geo app like Foursquare or Gowalla, shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the free shopkick app on their phone walks into a store. Once a shopkick Signal is detected, the app delivers reward points called “kickbucks” to the user for walking into a retail store.

Kickbucks can then be redeemed across all partner stores for gift card rewards or for Facebook Credits. User can also receive special discounts on specific products at Macy’s, Best Buy or Target. And you can collect kickbucks at American Eagle for simply trying on clothes and scanning a barcode. One compelling part of shopkick’s platform is the ability to earn kickbucks and redeem them at any partner retailer.

Of course, shopkick is rolling out the Android app just in time for the holiday shopping season and Black Friday. The company says that by the Friday after Thanksgiving, more than 1,000 individual stores and over 100 of the country’s largest malls will have fully deployed shopkick’s technology.

Shopkick faces competition from Stickybits, Facebook Places and others.

Company: shopkick
Website: shopkick.com
Launch Date: June 2009
Funding: $20M

shopkick was founded in June 2009 by Cyriac Roeding, Jeff Sellinger, Aaron Emigh, and is funded by Kleiner Perkins’ iFund, Greylock Partners and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, and investor in Facebook and Zynga, and Ron Conway. shopkick bridges the worlds of mobile and physical retail. In August 2010, shopkick launched the first mobile application that hands consumers rewards and exclusive deals at shopkick’s national retail partners simply for walking into thousands of stores and malls. shopkick created...

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