Shopkick No. 1 Most Frequently Used Shopping App and Now No. 34 of All Mobile Apps in the U.S.

PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Shopkick, the most widely used real-world shopping app, today announces that Nielsen ranked shopkick as the 34^th most widely used of all roughly 1,000,000 mobile apps in December 2012, ahead of other popular apps such as Skype, Yelp, foursquare, CNN, Angry Birds and Fandango. While still trailing giants like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter overall, shopkick dominated the shopping category during the holiday season, with more frequent and prolonged usage than all physical retailers' own apps including Starbucks, Walmart, Walgreens, Kroger, and Safeway.

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(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130213/SF59436-INFO-b)

Shopkick 3.0, released last October, topped the Nielsen shopping app statistics on three out of four axes. According to Nielsen, shopkick is the 4^th most widely used shopping app – behind Amazon, eBay and Groupon – which makes it the most widely used shopping app in the real world at physical retailers. Shopkick ranks No. 1 on most time spent in-app per month (2 hours, 37 minutes), No. 1 on the number of sessions per month (22) and No. 1 in terms of time spent per session (7 minutes).

Shopkick's users viewed more than 1 billion products in the app within three months – since the app was redesigned as shopkick 3.0 in October – a number that previously took shopkick one-and-a-half years to reach with its former version.  Previously, users looked at 5-8 products per day in the app, with shopkick 3.0 each user averages over 100 products viewed per day. 

"Mobile is redefining the physical retail world. It is on its way to become the No. 1 marketing tool for retailers and brands, because it is the only interactive medium consumers have with them in the non-interactive physical world, especially at stores. Companies that don't embrace that are being left behind," said Cyriac Roeding, co-founder and CEO of shopkick. "It's the perfect way for retailers and brands to touch shoppers at each point in the purchase cycle –from research through browsing, to purchase."

Since launching in August 2010, shopkick has driven more than $300M in revenue to its alliance of retail partners and brands, with more than $200M in 2012 alone. Each engagement on shopkick is valuable to brand and retail partners, and is a revenue event for shopkick: every walk-in to a partner store, every product scan, and every purchase. To date, shopkick has driven more than 17 million verified walk-ins to stores (2 million per month in Q4), 29 million product scans and millions of transactions.  Shopkick announced its first profitable quarter in Q4 2012.

Shopkick has accumulated 15 national retailers, including Target, Macy's, Old Navy, American Eagle, Crate & Barrel, Toys"R"Us, ExxonMobil and Simon Malls, and more than 70 brands such as Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods, Disney, Revlon, Unilever, Pepsi, and top financial institutions, Visa and MasterCard, as partners.

To provide high-value rewards to shoppers for actually being present in stores, the shopkick app detects a shopkick signal, emitted from a patent-pending device located in each participating store and picked up by a shopper's phone's microphone and then delivers "kicks™," shopkick's cross-retailer reward currency. Shoppers earn additional kicks for scanning products in-store, browsing "lookbooks" of content and for purchases at participating retailers. Right in the shopkick app, shoppers can redeem kicks to treat themselves with store gift cards, free coffee and dinners, Coach handbags, song downloads, movie tickets, Facebook Credits, donations to charity and more.

Shopkick is available for free on the iPhone from the App Store at www.itunes.com/appstore/ and for Android from Google Play at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shopkick.app. See how shopkick works here (video): http://youtu.be/ejx1LdgcUPA.

About shopkick, Inc.

shopkick, Inc. is the largest real-world shopping app, and the first mobile application that hands consumers high-value rewards, offers and exclusive deals at its national retail partners simply for walking into more than 7,500 stores and malls, and for interacting with partner brand products at over 250,000 locations nationwide. In 2012, Nielsen rated shopkick the most widely and often used real-world shopping app, ahead of any physical retailers' apps.  Shopkick is the only 100% performance-based marketing platform in the physical retail world, with measurable foot traffic and transactions at stores.  Its first profitable quarter was reached in Q4 2012. The app grew to 4 million users in little over two years. The free shopkick app is available for the iPhone and Android.

Shopkick's growing Partner Alliance includes American Eagle Outfitters, Best Buy, Crate and Barrel, ExxonMobil, Macy's, MasterCard, Old Navy, Simon Property Group, Sony, The Sports Authority, Target, Toys"R"Us, The Wet Seal, Visa, Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods, Revlon, Unilever, Levi's, Intel, HP and more. The Palo Alto-based startup is funded by Kleiner Perkins' iFund, Greylock Partners and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, and investor in Facebook and Zynga. In 2012, the World Economic Forum (WEF) named shopkick a Tech Pioneer, an honor previously given to Google, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

SOURCE shopkick