AllThingsD » barcode

Walmart.com Lets You Pay With Cash When Shopping Online

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:00:19 +0000

Walmart.com is launching today “Pay with Cash,” a new feature that enables users to place orders online and then pay for them at a nearby Walmart.

In an interview, Joel Anderson, president and CEO of Walmart.com, said the new feature is targeting people who don’t have access to debit or credit cards.

“The fact that only 15 percent of our transactions are done in the form of credit at our stores means there’s a large percentage of Walmart customers who are dependent on cash to transact online. We definitely think it is a big opportunity,” he said.

When using “Pay with Cash,” customers purchase items online and then have 48 hours to go to a local Walmart store or a Walmart Neighborhood Market to pay for the order. Once the order is paid for, the items will then ship.

The concept is fairly simple in a world where so much energy is being focused on futuristic stuff, like waving your mobile phone to pay for things and digital wallets.

But by opening up the site to cash-only users, Anderson said customers will now have access to the hundreds of thousands of items that are not carried in the store. Additionally, if it is a gift, they will no longer have to buy an item in the store and ship it themselves.

Anderson said Walmart built the technology in-house, but other services are cropping up that offer similar benefits.

For instance, Mountain View, Calif.-based PayNearMe allows people to make purchases at various online retailers and pay for them at 7-11’s, where a clerk scans a barcode and collects the cash.

Amazon Will Pay Shoppers $5 to Walk Out of Stores Empty-Handed

Tricia Duryee — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:04:11 +0000

Amazon is offering consumers up to $5 off on purchases if they compare prices using the online giant’s mobile phone application in a store.

The promotion goes live Saturday and will serve as a way for Amazon to increase usage of its bar-code-scanning application, while also collecting intelligence on prices in the stores.

This holiday season, mobile commerce is surging as more people become comfortable using applications on their phone to compare prices or simply shop when not at home or at work.

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, the biggest online shopping day of the year so far, mobile sales reached 6.6 percent, jumping from 2.3 percent in 2010, according to IBM’s online retail study.

Amazon is not the only company hoping for a strong mobile Christmas.

Last quarter, eBay started airing TV commercials – its first in the past few years — to promote its mobile applications. The company estimated that mobile commerce merchandise volume this year will hit $5 billion. Additionally, eBay’s PayPal unit is expected to exceed $3.5 billion in mobile revenue.

Amazon has never released figures on how well its mobile applications do.

While the information empowers consumers, it terrifies retailers, who increasingly are feeling like showrooms — shoppers come to to check out the merchandise but ultimately decide to walk out and buy online instead.

Amazon’s Price Check app, which is available for iPhone and Android, allows shoppers to scan a bar code, take a picture of an item or conduct a text search to find the lowest prices. Amazon is also asking consumers to submit the prices of items with the app, so Amazon knows if it is still offering the best prices.

“We scour online and in-store advertisements from other retailers, every day, year-round,” said Sam Hall, director of Amazon Mobile. “Now, we are enabling customers to use the Price Check app to share in-store prices while they search for the best deals.”

While Amazon’s applications and its $5 incentive can be viewed as friendly to consumers, physical retailers will see it only one way — as an attack.

The one-day promotion Dec. 10 will offer 5 percent, or up to $5, off on as many as three items.

Mobile Marketer Augme Buys Bar Code Start-Up Jagtag

Peter Kafka — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 12:00:06 +0000

Mobile marketing company Augme Technologies has bought Jagtag, a start-up that specializes in bar codes and “QR codes.” That’s the technology that creates little pieces of visual shorthand phone users can photograph and send to a marketer in exchange for content; it’s an idea that some, but not all, mobile ad folks have been interested in for years. Augme bought Jagtag for $5.5 million, almost all of which came from Augme stock, which trades on the OTC Bulletin Board. Jagtag had previously raised $3.6 million.

Starbucks Serves Up Mobile Payments to Millions of Android Users

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 17:28:59 +0000

This may not be exactly what you thought the future of mobile payments would look like, where consumers would tap their phone to pay for a cup of coffee, but Starbucks has identified an intermediary step.

Following the early success of its iPhone application, Starbucks has released an application for Android that will enable users to pay for their extra hot Vente Caramel Macchiato or Iced Mocha Frappuccino with their phones.

The mobile application lets consumers reload their Starbucks payment card, view transactions, track awards, and, ultimately, pay by scanning the barcode on the phone’s screen.

The Starbucks Android app is available in the Android Market and will work on phones running operating systems 2.1 or higher.

Starbucks will soon accept mobile payments at 9,000 locations with the announcement today that it will be rolling out soon to 1,000 cafes in Safeway grocery stores across the U.S.

Starbucks first launched the iPhone app in January and reported that within three months, more than three million people had paid using Starbucks Card Mobile.

At an event last month, K.C. MacLaren, Starbucks’ director of mobile and emerging platforms, said the application isn’t about adding incremental revenue, but about driving loyalty. Other evolutions in the pipeline include the ability to order a coffee for pick-up later in the store.

Shopkick Checks In With Target–CEO Cyriac Roeding Talks About Social Shopping

Kara Swisher — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 18:28:13 +0000

The idea of being rewarded for being a consumer is getting a lot of heat of late, as retailers seek to take advantage of the fast-moving social phenom among consumers, especially young ones.

Thus, a wide range of efforts to combine location-based mobile apps with purchasing, both online and offline.

Earlier this week, BoomTown posted on a funding for one such start-up, Topguest, which links check-ins with airline and hotel loyalty programs.

Today, another company in the space, shopkick, announced it had added another store–Minneapolis-based Target–to its list of retailers deploying its platform and mobile app.

As with customers of Macy’s, Best Buy and others, users of the shopkick app will receive points and other rewards, as well as instant mobile coupons, just for walking in the store.

The point being: Retailers need to reward foot traffic and not just purchases.

The Target partnership is limited now to 242 stores in the Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City and the San Francisco area.

Target will also offer scannable mobile coupons to customers for redemption at checkout.

It will be interesting to see how effective apps such as shopkick are as they roll out, as consumers test them.

Unlike others that offer quick deals–from Foursquare to Facebook to, now, Yahoo–shopkick uses its “kickbucks” as an enticement simply for being present in a store or scanning certain barcodes.

It’s certainly easy enough–my son, Louie, did it with ease and definite enjoyment–although a user does need to remember to fire up the app when entering a participating store.

There is also a small device retailers need to install need to make the shopkick ecosystem work.

CEO Cyriac Roeding, a former EVP for CBS’ mobile unit, created the concept for the Menlo Park, Calif.-based start-up while an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins.

The company has raised $20 million in venture funding from Kleiner’s iFund, longtime Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman, as well as Hoffman’s home at Greylock Partners.

Here is a video interview I did with Roeding about where shopkick is going next:

[ See post to watch video ]

Starbucks' Pay-By-App Test Grinds Away

Voices — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 18:13:14 +0000

Starbucks said today it was expanding its mobile-payment testing grounds to include 300 company-owned stores in the NYC-Long Island area. The system uses an app version of the Starbucks Card. The app displays a barcode that is read by the scanner at check-out. Testing of the app (available for the iPhone, the iPod touch and certain BlackBerrys) began late last year in Starbucks locations inside Target stores and a few outlets in Seattle and Northern California.

EBay Now Equipped With Frickin' RedLasers

John Paczkowski — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:30:09 +0000

EBay CEO John Donahoe says that a few years from now we’ll be making more purchases with our cellphones than from our wallets. And the company’s sales do seem to bear that out. At our D8 conference, Donahoe said eBay’s (EBAY) iPhone app was responsible for $600 million in sales last year. So the company’s acquisition today of RedLaser makes good sense.

The mobile barcode-scanning application has proven a big hit with savvy shoppers who use it for on-the-spot comparative pricing information, snapping photos of barcodes, which the application uses to discover additional information about the product as well as prices from other merchants. Now that eBay owns it, a lot of that information will be pulled from its own listings and retail partners.

When it debuted on Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes App Store, RedLaser was priced at $2. But beginning today, eBay is offering it for free, and soon it will integrate RedLaser’s barcode scanning tech into its current iPhone applications.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Amazon Remembers Forgets Barcode Scanner

John Paczkowski — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 18:07:11 +0000

There’s a new beachhead in Amazon’s campaign to commandeer sales from competing retailers: Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. This morning the retailer uncrated Amazon Mobile, an iPhone/iPod Touch application that allows users to browse its wares and those of associated retailers like Target (TGT) and Macy’s (M). The app supports Amazon’s standard features–customer reviews, “1-Click Shopping” and whatnot–as well as an intriguing new one. Called Amazon Remembers, it allows users to search for products they’d like to purchase by photographing real-world products. Testing Amazon Remembers this morning, I snapped a picture of the Sonos Controller on my desk and, sure enough, about 10 minutes later Amazon (AMZN) let me know that it does offer that product for sale.

A neat little feature, although why anyone would actively use it is beyond me. Text searches on Amazon Mobile–and Amazon’s iPhone-optimized site–are both easier and far, far faster. Why bother with the cumbersome “snap photo-submit photo-wait for Amazon to identify product in photo and its availability and price”?

What this application is clearly lacking and, frankly, just begging for, is a barcode scanner and real-time price comparison function. That would make it a killer app, indeed. And Snappr has proven barcode scanning on the iPhone is possible. The device just needs an improved camera for it to work….