RunKeeper co-founder Michael Sheeley tends to get asked why a tech guy who wears cargo shorts would want to build a shopping app. And so in advance of the formal launch of his app Kickscout today, he wrote a post answering the question.
Shopping, he explained, is an experience as much as anything else. It’s often about the people you’re with as much as it is about the things you buy. And in Sheeley’s estimation, therein lies a significant opportunity.
We’ve covered Kickscout before, with Chase Garbarino laying out the grand vision in a post last summer. Nearly a year later, the product has emerged out of beta. Broadly, this is a social shopping play, but it’s optimized to bridge the gap between e-commerce and in-store shopping. Flag an item online and a friend might pick it up for you in-store, or the friend might find something in-store that they then recommend. (If I buy something for you at your request, you can send me money through the app.)
To that end, Kickscout is very mobile focused, so that shoppers in brick and mortar retail can photograph an item – which Kickscout then can find in its database – and suggest it to a friend.
The name encompasses the two core actions that take place on the app: You ‘Kick’ an item online – similar to pinning it to demonstrate interest – and then you can ‘Scout’ an item in-store for a friend.
Sheeley and his team have been collecting feedback for the last several months, and based on what they heard from early users overhauled the UI to its current sleek design. They also discovered that users didn’t automatically know what their friends wanted, which was why they added the online “Kick” aspect, so users could see what their friends had expressed interest in.
As I’ve written, the line between “e-commerce” and the rest of retail is blurring quickly. And so what I like about Kickscout is how it integrates a whole range of what traditionally would be thought of as separate shopping experiences into one service and network.
And Sheeley is right about the social aspect of shopping. Imagine walking into a mall and seeing a map of the stores overlaid with the locations of 1) products you want to buy; 2) products your friends have bought and liked; and 3) products your friends want to have.
That’s where Kickscout is going. And in case you’re thinking that the pitch to users – kick, scout, in store, online – is too complicated to take off, consider Sheeley’s brilliantly simple slogan: Shop as a Team.
