Retail brands, and the vendors that serve them, continue to obsess about how to bridge the gap between online intent and offline sales.
Retailigence, the developer of a “hyperlocal marketing platform” for brands and retailers, has rolled out a solution that allows consumers to reserve products online and pick up in-store. Although the concept is certainly not new – and many companies are trying their hand at connecting the mobile product search to the in-store purchase – Retailigence is betting on its appNET ecosystem of third-party developers to differentiate.
AppNet applications range from the popular mobile shopping app ShopSavvy to TheFind’s Catalogue app, which takes the store catalog and digitizes it for mobile users. At present, Retailigence has more than 25 million unique users of its network and feeds intent-driven shopping data to more than 1,200 developer-API partners.
“The problem in the retail industry is that it’s really fragmented,” commented Peter Christianson, director of product marketing at Retailigence. “There are all of these feeds out there that are available. … For a developer to go to Best Buy and then Sears and Nordstrom directly, it’s a lot of work for them. The benefit to us is that when we distribute this information, we’re gaining access to all of these users from all of these different applications and we’re gaining insights into what consumers are looking for.”
The premise of the reserve-online, pickup in-store apparatus is to take shoppers one step further down the funnel from the awareness and research phase carried out on their mobile device to the point of actual purchase.
“As we progress with this product, we can say, ‘Here’s a promotion if you want to pick up this product today,’ or, ‘Here’s where we can give you a discount on it,’ if a retailer has given us a special deal,” Christanson said. Retailigence could foreseeably extend the scope of those promotions with adPOP, a display ads product that brings local product inventory into messaging.
Even beyond the transactional data it can gather as users move through the purchase funnel, Retailigence can provide insights to developers with its event API. “We can see if they’re looking for, ‘What’s the closest store?’ or ‘What’s the best price?’ so we can determine if they’re being driven by convenience or if it’s still about price,” Christianson said. “We can see, ‘Are they looking at a [local product] but then end up going to Amazon?’”
This spring, Retailigence raised $6.3 million in Series-B financing from DJF, Quest, Motorola Solutions Venture Capital, Telenav and OPT. Retail brands using it include Home Depot and Nordstrom.
