Driving Offline Sales With Your Mobile Application

Many retailers are investing in mobile apps, not primarily to drive transactions directly from this new channel, but to drive offline sales. Their focus is not to get customers to buy via their mobile phone but to extend the phone to become an essential part of their offline shopping experience. This post will explore 9 features that all retailers with physical stores should consider including in their apps to drive offline sales.

1. Store Locator

Store locators allow the mobile customer to easily locate the nearest physical store to them. A phone’s native GPS and map capabilities provide an efficient and fast way for the customer to locate and get directions to the nearest stores and find store information such as opening times, events, phone numbers and store features.

Barnes and Noble allows customers to find a store using GPS, see the distance to the store, view the store features and locate the store using Google maps. Though it’s great functionality, B&N could have embedded the maps into the App so the user doesn’t need to exit the application to view the map.

2. In-Store Availability

In-store availability allows the mobile customer to check in real time if a product is in stock in a physical store. This is very useful when one store is out of stock, allowing the shopper to self serve and find out immediately if a nearby store has stock. Additionally adding the ability to reserve the item guarantees it will still be there when the customer picks it up.

Barnes and Noble allows customer to reserve an item and pick it up later.

3. Social Media

Integrating social media into your app allows customers to virally promote your products via their Facebook account.

The Gap allow users of their Style Mixer app to upload their outfit creations to Facebook.

4. Product Finder / Search

Some retailers are providing advanced product finders using the embedded phone camera. Customers can snap pictures of a barcode or the cover of a book / DVD and the app quickly identifyies and displays the product. For online retailers like Amazon, this feature allows customers in a store to do product price comparisons. For retailers with an offline presence, this feature allows the customer to quickly look up additional details on a product (such as ratings and reviews) whilst browsing a product in your store.

Amazon (left) and Barnes and Noble (right) both provide camera based product identifiers.

More Information: http://www.getelastic.com/offline-sales-mobile-apps/