• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, November 9, 2011

Old Navy has joined 10 other retailers in Shopkick’s Partner Alliance of store chains equipped with resident technology that can interact with the iOS and Android app.

Starting this weekend at Old Navy locations nationwide, presence detection at stores will reward Shopkick users with redeemable “kick” points. Old Navy joins Best Buy, American Eagle Outfitters, Crate & Barrel, Target, The Sports Authority, Toys ‘R’ Us and mall operator Simon Property Group, among others, in the app’s collection of retail partners.

The apps also provide information about promotions in-store for featured partners and rewards kicks for scanning codes on select items. Shopkick claims 3.5 million active users and presence in over 4,000 retail locations.

To mark Old Navy’s partnership in Shopkick, the retailer is offering a $10 off coupon on purchases of $40 and above at the store this weekend exclusively for Shopkick users. The walk-in rewards system will also go live at 1,000 retail locations. When Shopkick users enter a participating location with their app live, the smartphone’s microphone picks up an audio signal from the Shopkick device in-store. The customer gets “kicks” credited to their system and the marketer is assured their efforts and investment are going to customers.

According to Shopkick CEO Cyriac Roeding: “Consumers love the kicks.” He reports that the app so far has produced 3 million walk-ins of people entering stores with the app live. There have been 8 million product scans with the app and 700 million product views.

“For retailers it makes sense, because the app can verify location within feet,” he says. “This type of presence detection is not available through traditional location-based applications that rely on GPS technology, which has an error radius of 50-1,000 yards on mobile phones.”

Still, many retailers with whom Shopkick partners, such as Best Buy, already have their own multifunction branded apps. Roeding saye there is no collision of interests between his rewards apps and the retailers’ own apps; Shopkick is offering a rewards program that reaches across retailers.

“By bundling different retailers in one app, we are resembling a mall on the phone,” he says. “In the real world, retailers love malls, because they bundle foot traffic. In the mobile world, they love Shopkick because Shopkick bundles attention on mobile and turns it into foot traffic.” He argues that a rewards system allows a retailer to attract users to products without resorting to margin-slicing discounts.

Roeding says that Shopkick users have exhibited high frequency in opening and referencing the app. The active user opens the app 14 days in a typical month to look at 16 stores in a day. The user demo is 60% female with 49% ages 25 to 39. “The average Shopkick user is 27 years old and has one kid,” he says. 

The walk-in system is present now in 4,000 stores, the company says, including 250 malls.