Walmart  is ramping up its mobile strategy and releasing a new iPhone app that provides a number of features aimed at improving the shopping experience for users, who are increasingly interacting with the retailer with mobile and social tools in addition to traditional in-store visits. The new iPhone app comes fresh off the heels of Walmart’s first iPad app, which was introduced late last month, and it shows where the company is heading now that it’s rolling all of its mobile products into its new @Walmart Labs. It’s also just in time for the holidays, which are going to be huge for mobile commerce.

The new iPhone app, which should be available in the next few days, packs in a number of features, including a new smart shopping list tool that allows people to speak their shopping list into their phone to create a list. Users can also create a list by scanning a barcode or typing in products. The shopping list, which can be shared by email, can be paired with a new budgeting tool that pulls up real-time prices for products, so consumers can calculate their bill ahead of time. And they can grab manufacturer coupons for the items on their list or find other coupons for products at Walmart. Users will need to print out the coupons from an email.

Walmart will enable users to pull product information — including reviews, ratings, price and availability — from the app. They’ll also be able to scan QR codes for information. In a test in a limited number of stores, Walmart will provide a store item finder tool that tells people the exact location of products. It can work with a smart shopping list, which can organize the products by their location.

The recently released iPad app is designed specifically for a more casual browsing experience. It provides users with a view on the right side of the best recent deals and it let’s users drill down to get more detailed product information. There’s a mode that lets you browse one specific store so the items are organized first by products you can buy at a user’s favorite location.

The products are part of Walmart’s efforts to ride the big shift in commerce as the introduction of mobile and social upend the way consumers buy things. Increasingly, shoppers come into stores armed with smartphones while others hunt at home on tablets, guided by recommendations from friends on social networks. Walmart is trying to get ahead of that and address all the different ways people want to shop, whether it’s in store, online or out and about while on a mobile device. They’re also trying to use mobile to help provide people with more self-serve tools and deliver more more personalized experience.

“Mobile gives us an opportunity to bust up the ideas of channels and create a seamless experience for consumers,” said Paul Cousineau, Walmart VP of mobile products.

It’s interesting to see Walmart exposing more of its data to help consumers. This can be tricky for a retailer but it’s helpful for consumers to see in-store inventory and real-time pricing. I think it’s still early in this epic transformation of commerce. But companies are going to have to be smart about how they leverage all these new and disruptive tools in the hands of consumers. Increasingly, consumers are empowered by mobile and social, and companies need to keep up and provide great shopping experiences that incorporates all the ways people want to search, research and buy.

We’ll be discussing more about the future of commerce with Venky Harinarayan, SVP of Walmart Global eCommerce and Head of @WalmartLabs at our inaugural GigaOM Roadmap conference Thursday in San Francisco.

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Google Wallet adds coupons, rewards points, Jamba Juice originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Oct 2011 09:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LevelUp, the daily deal venture by location-based service SCVNGR, got off to a promising start in March with an interesting take on deals that spread out discounts over three visits. But the service as it was first conceived was shut down three months ago after it didn’t live up to SCVNGR’s expectations and was reportedly losing money.

So what was missing? Seth Priebatsch, founder of SCVNGR, said it needed a better take on building loyalty for merchants. So Priebatsch went back to the drawing board and has relaunched LevelUp with a new approach to driving loyalty that begins with credits for users who visit a business and includes a new mobile payment system built by SCVNGR.

LevelUp, take two

The new LevelUp works like this: Instead of buying a deal outright, say for worth of food at a restaurant like other daily deal sites work, LevelUp offers a more modest instantly redeemable credit of perhaps or for customers on their first visit. The new service is now expanding beyond Boston and Philadelphia to New York and San Francisco

To pay, users just link a debit or credit card to their LevelUp app and present their app to merchant, flashing a QR code. The code can be scanned by the merchant using their own mobile device or special Android devices provided for a limited time by SCVNGR. The credit is immediately applied and users can start working toward their next reward, which is triggered after a certain amount of purchases are made. While plenty of others are doing doing punch cards, Priebatsch said LevelUp works because it’s tuned to provide the most incentive for consumers to come back, which he said requires a reward to be unlocked after about the equivalent of four to five visits. And it has a payment element.

The payment play inside the app provides a number of benefits for both consumers and merchants. Users don’t have to mess with coupons or worry about loading up an account. The app draws money when it’s used and makes payment easy, kind of like the Starbucks card mobile app only without the need to fill up an account. And it can provide transaction information to users.  Google Wallet also provides some similar benefits with its NFC payment system but initially, it can’t provide consumers much immediate information on transaction history because many of the payment terminals aren’t updated to pass on purchase data.

A new upside for merchants

But the new LevelUp payment system is even more helpful for merchants. Priebatsch said SCVNGR has done some clever work on the back end to reduce the fees on payments by about 35 to 50 percent compared to using the same payment source with a credit card swipe. And more importantly, LevelUp can provide users and merchants with instant information on the transactions, which can help merchants understand how effective their offers are, who their new customers are, what their habits are and how best to target them. Essentially, LevelUp can own the whole deal process, from the first deal offer to redemption, something Google, PayPal, American Express and others are doing as well.

Priebatsch said the LevelUp service, which has been quietly been in testing for the last 9 weeks at about 500 locations in Boston and Philadelphia, has proven to be a helpful tool for merchants with consumers. LevelUp’s 100,000 users are turning to LevelUp about twice a week now and are tipping about 21 percent at sit down restaurants. Priebatsch said 45 percent of customers return to pay full price within one month and 65 percent of customers at quick service restaurants do so within 30 days. Users increase their spending by 38 percent on a transaction when they unlock new credit. LevelUp isn’t taking a cut of transactions but is instead charging merchants a monthly fee.

Priebatsch said the first version of LevelUp worked like many other daily deals in building buzz and attracting users to a merchant. But it didn’t solve the fact that it can be expensive for merchants and it can hurt their brand. Now with credits applied only when people show up the first time and then after several visits where people pay full price, a business has a better way of managing how much they spend on discounts and they can do it in a way that doesn’t paint their brand with a big discount label. Instead, it emphasizes loyalty.

But will consumers buy in?

I think there are decent ideas at work here. It’s clear that any daily deal system needs to be a win for merchants and some critics of Groupon accuse it of not being beneficial ultimately for merchants. So a more retailer-friendly system has merit. It’s also helpful for merchants to not have to offer such big discounts and associate their name with huge deals, which can erode their brands. And building a payment network in theory makes some sense because you can streamline the purchase process and provide instant information to both consumers and merchants about transactions. And you can close the loop on offers so merchants understand how their deal investment is doing.

But it remains to be seen if people will step up in big numbers to have their credit and debit accounts linked to a LevelUp app. Starbucks’ success, however, suggest it might work though SCVNGR will need to do a lot of marketing to get the word out about LevelUp. But it’s still going to be an uphill battle for LevelUp. It’s a very crowded market and Groupon and Living Social are still the best known names in this space with Google coming on as a rising challenger.

From the sound of it, LevelUp as it was first conceived had a tough go initially. It’s unclear whether, even with the new updates, the app will be able to do a whole lot better on a big scale. The early results sound promising, so we’ll have to see. But even with some interesting ideas, it’ll take a lot of work and money to ensure that consumers and merchants take notice. This could be the last gasp for LevelUp — or the major tuning it needed to finally get going.

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Google launches its own daily deal site, just months after Groupon rejected its billion offer to buy the king of local coupons.

Wired Top Stories

Google launches its own daily deal site, just months after Groupon rejected its billion offer to buy the king of local coupons.

Wired Top Stories