Check-ins for store products with Shopkick

The company reaches more than 3M items scanned

You can check in at your favorite restaurant, at Starbucks, at work, and at home, but how about checking in at a box of Triscuits?  Now you can!  Shopkick, an app that combines location and barcode scans, allows users to scan items while shopping to earn kickbucks rewards, and the company announced Tuesday that users have now scanned more than three million products at 250,000 locations nationwide.

The app’s unique “walk-in” location technology allows users to earn points just be entering a store belonging to one of Shopkick’s 1,100 retail partners, including any Target, Best Buy, Macy’s, Sports Authority, Crate and Barrel, American Eagle Outfitters, Wet Seal, and more.  Interestingly, the technology isn’t GPS-based, since it has an error radius of 50 to 1,000 yards.  Rather, Shopkick outfits the retail partner with a sensor that detects the user's device microphone when he or she has entered the store, allowing the user to earn points just by walking through the doors.

But the real question is, what are shoppers scanning?  Shopkick could provide an interesting glimpse into the average American’s diet.  The company offers a teaser in its announcement: the top scanned items include Velveeta (as in the cheese that tastes like liquefied car parts), Oreo cookies, Kool-Aid, Triscuits, and Planters nuts.  So apparently America is just constantly reeling from a bad hangover…all the time.

The company could not be reached for comment, so I couldn’t find out exactly which item is the most scanned product, but how lame would that be if it was Velveeta?  

The company’s product partners include Kraft, Procter and Gamble, Unilever, and HP.

"We've been very loud about our shopkick Signal technology and what it has enabled for retailers: the ability to offer tangible, high-value rewards to consumers while providing marketing insights to retailers and brands, from multiple points in the purchase cycle," said shopkick co-founder and CEO, Cyriac Roeding, in a prepared statement. "What we've built in parallel is our brand-scanning rewards program, where anyone, anywhere can earn kickbucks by simply scanning partner products while shopping.  Millions of times our users have done that."

Launched in August 2010, the app has some 750,000 users, 10% of whom are active on the app every day.  The kickbucks that users earn by scanning products can be redeemed for in-store gift cards, song downloads, movie tickets, hotel vouchers, Facebook credits, or they can be put towards charities.