Emphasizing a mobile-payment method that translates to an enhanced shopping experience for consumers, AisleBuyer LLC has added a New England supermarket chain that will offer its “virtual checkout” application, the Boston-based mobile commerce provider announced Nov. 7.
Big Y Foods Inc. will provide its customers with the AisleBuyer mShop mobile application for the Apple Inc. iPhone and Google Inc. Android and Blackberry Inc. smartphones. The Springfield, Mass.-based independent supermarket chain, which has 61 locations throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts, at this time will utilize all of the mShop features except being able to pay with the phone, AisleBuyer stated. Another client, Magic Beans, with four locations in Massachusetts, utilizes all of the mShop features, AisleBuyer stated.
The application provides pricing and nutritional information about products, opportunities to use discount coupons related to products in an aisle, and options to pay in the grocery store aisles or at a point-of-sale terminal, AisleBuyer CEO Andrew Paradise tells PaymentsSource.
“It’s the total in-store mobile-shopping experience, and it is even more promising in a grocery store because the consumer using the mobile application never waits in a line, and Saturday lines at the store can be brutal,” Paradise says.
The customer uses the smartphone to build shopping lists and fill a “virtual shopping cart,” Paradise says.
In addition, the consumer uses the application to scan product barcodes to obtain pricing or nutritional information about the product or to accept discount offers on various items, Paradise adds.
Location-based software in the application helps the consumer locate items in the store or to receive discounts on spaghetti sauce while looking at pasta products, depending on how the merchant wants to use the application’s marketing tools, Paradise says. In addition, the application works outside of the retail environment by providing maps, directions, locations and store hours of merchants accepting the AisleBuyer application, he adds.
After the customer scans an item using the smartphone camera, the application prompts the consumer to “add to cart” or “check out” with options to pay in the aisle or at a point-of-sale terminal if the store has Near Field Communication technology. Those who choose to pay in the aisle would show a sales clerk the digital receipt when leaving the store, Paradise adds.
Most stores appoint someone to help customers at self-checkout lines, and those employees likely would perform the audits of the digital transactions through a “virtual lane” category shown on their cash register screens, Paradise suggests.
“It would be like overlooking the extra checkout line that doesn’t exist,” Paradise says.
Merchants offering the application to customers receive detailed information in their software package about the consumer buying habits with the mobile app, which helps determine marketing promotions and to gauge any “average increase in shopping cart size” when customers accept promotion offers, Paradise says.
Merchants pay AisleBuyer a percentage from each transaction completed with the application, though Paradise did not disclose the percentage his company receives.
One industry analyst views services supported by the AisleBuyer software as key for mobile pay companies moving forward.
The emphasis is on making the shopping and buying experience better, not just the payment experience, Todd Ablowitz, president of Centennial, Colo.-based Double Diamond Group, LLC tells PaymentsSource.
“Scanning products in the aisle is big, checking out from your phone is big, but being presented with offers specific to what you are looking at is very significant,” Ablowitz says. “It provides a huge amount of data for the merchant and the consumer and that makes a powerful package, long-term.”
Offering a completely revised shopping experience will become the norm for successful mobile-payment companies, Ablowitz suggests.
AisleBuyer, which has been in operation for about 30 months, recently signed more retail partnerships that will be announced in the coming months, Paradise says.
Consumers may download the free AisleBuyer mShop from Apple, Android or Blackberry application stores. The AisleBuyer uses its own mobile wallet and payment gateway, which accepts all major credit card brands, debit cards and loyalty cards, Paradise says.
The consumer scans or keys in the credit card information into the mobile wallet, he adds.
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