Beacons Bringing Customers In-Store

Use of retail beacons continues to increase for holiday shopping season.

December 05, 2014

NEW YORK — Beacons are popping up at all types of stores this holiday season, but are they a shopper's best friend or another pesky Big Brother monitoring our every move, asks an Associated Press report this week.

Beacons — square or rectangular devices smaller than a smartphone — can hang on a wall or be placed on a machine and communicate with a consumer’s phone via Bluetooth signals. Accessed through mobile apps, retail beacon technology aims to entice consumers to spend money by alerting customers to sales or sending a coupon when they are in close proximity to a store. (For more on beacon technology, read “The Beacon Break Through” in the October 2014 issue of NACS Magazine.)

According to the AP report, Macy's has installed beacons in all of its 840 department stores and other department store chains such as Kohl's are testing them in select locations. Some experts predict that use of the technology will skyrocket from the 50,000 beacons in use now to between 5 million and 10 million by the end of next year.

Despite the frequent focus on online shopping, the vast majority of shopping is still done in stores. Beacons are a way to merge in-store shopping with mobile access to information — and data shows they work.

The AP reported that between July and September, 30% of shoppers who received a "push-ad" from an in-store beacon used that offer to buy something, according to a survey by Swirl, a leading marketing technology company that has worked with numerous retailers to deploy beacons. Sixty percent of shoppers opened beacon-sent messages, and over half of those surveyed said they would do more holiday shopping at the stores as a result of their beacon experience.

At the same time, not everyone is thrilled that a beacon app is monitoring them when they walk around with their cellphone, arguing that it may provide retailers with too much information about users.

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