A New Mobile Trend is Born: Retail Giants Creating Shopping Apps

By: Hillel Fuld

Every so often, we see a whole wind of new apps appear in the App Store forming a trend or a new category of mobile applications. It happened with photography apps such as Instagram, PicPlz, Mobli, QuickPix, and others. It also happened with social apps such as Oink, Batch, and others.

The latest trend the App Store seems to be introducing is apps that facilitate a better retail shopping experience. Now, there are not tens of such apps introduced in the last week, but there are two, and they come from two of the biggest names in retail, Apple and Walmart.

Apple released its app called Apple Store 2.0 on the App Store this week (can you say that sentence ten times fast?), and it is pretty astounding. You can read what new features Apple Store offers here. In summary, you order an Apple product using the new app and your Apple ID payment method. You then stroll into the nearest Apple Store and within 12 minutes of the time you placed the order from the App, your new Apple product is waiting for you in the store.

The new Apple Store 2.0 also allows customers to walk into an Apple Store, choose something they like, take it off the shelf, scan it, and walk out. No human interaction needed. Some say this is not such a revolution as many supermarkets have self check out already, but the fact that you can check yourself out using only your iPhone, that seems pretty amazing to me. Download the free app here.

Now on to Walmart, the biggest retail giant in the world. So a few months back, Walmart went tech by means of an acquisition. It bought Kosmix that, as described by TechCrunch, is “a platform that enables users to filter and organize content in social networks, in order to connect people with information that matters to them, in realtime.”

Well, today Walmart released all new iPhone and iPad apps that are intended to better connect their customers’ offline and online shopping experiences. The iPhone app offers some pretty impressive new features including the ability to create shopping lists by voice, scan products via their barcode and acquire manufacturer coupons via the app.  The iPad app supports the ability to find items both online and at the local store.

TechCrunch explains “Although social integration is not present in the new apps just yet (that’s coming, though), they do offer some cool tricks of their own. For example, you can talk to your iPhone to build your shopping list, without having to pause or speak each item individually. That means you can say “milk, eggs, bread, laundry detergent, swiss cheese, cold cuts” all in one breath, and the app knows to separate each item onto its own line. The speech component, like that found on the new iPhone 4S, is powered by Nuance. However, in this case, it’s baked into the app natively, allowing for backward compatibility with all existing models of iPhone.” That is some impressive technology for a retain player. Read more about the new apps here. Also, check out Walmart’s other mobile apps here.

When I  hear about old school players like Walmart going mobile, I cannot help but think about the mobile revolution we are undergoing as we speak. I mean without the simplicity of mobile platforms such as iOS and Android, it is safe to say, Walmart and other retail giants would never consider telling their customers to use a mobile application to shop. It wouldn’t be intuitive enough, and technically speaking, wouldn’t even be possible since the whole app culture might not even be around if not for Steve Jobs and Apple. Yes, i know he did not invent software but the App Store definitely brought apps to mainstream consciousness.

The bottom line is this. If Walmart is going mobile, any business can go mobile. Mobile is everywhere and no matter what space you are in, you need to be on mobile devices. It won’t be long before mobile content consumption surpasses Web (on the PC) content consumption, and we are already seeing this happen in the world of mobile advertising. It has already been deemed more effective than Web advertising.

In conclusion, I will say one thing. Yes, we understand that the makers of these platforms, Apple, Google, Microsoft and others, deserve the credit for this revolution. It is, however, crucial that we understand that a mobile platform in today’s ecosystem, is nowhere without its development community. Mobile OSs have fallen simply as a result of a lack of supporting apps. See the Playbook, WebOS, and others for examples.It is for this reason we do what we do. Developers deserve the credit and providing them with revenue from their apps is the first step of paying back our debts for creating this amazing mobile revolution that is changing every aspect of our day to day lives.

Please share your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter, Google+, or Facebook where we are always listening.
In addition, to sign up with inneractive and start monetizing your free apps now, click here.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.