In terms of reach, shopkick is in fourth place, with 10 percent of smartphone users while Amazon comes in first with 19 percent of users followed by eBay with 17 percent, Groupon with 13 percent and Starbucks with 8 percent. Separately, shopkick reported that since launching its redesign in October 2012, users have viewed more than one billion products in the app.

“The reason why shopkick is so successful is because we are redefining the arc from the couch to the store and letting consumers know what is hot at the store while at at home and then rewarding them for just showing up in the store when opening the app, and providing a great interface with gaming mechanics included, and also with beautiful merchandising,” said Cyriac Roeding, CEO of shopkick, Palo Alto, CA.

“So the combination of merchandising, rewards and gaming mechanics and a slick user interface are what makes shopkick unique,” he said.

“Finally the universal currency for rewards across multiple retailers makes it very attractive. It is sort of like a loyalty program that gets ever bigger.”

A rewarding experience
Shopkick works with retailers such as Target, Macy’s and Old Navy as well as brands such as Procter & Gamble and Kraft Foods to provide rewards to shoppers for being present in stores.

The shopkick app detects a signal, emitted from a device located in each participating store – picked up by the microphone on a shopper’s phone – and delivers cross-retailer reward currency known as “kicks.”

Shoppers can also earn kicks for scanning products in-store, browsing content and for making purchases.

The results point to how smartphone owners are taking their devices with them into stores and engaging with them as part of their shopping activities, with shopkick posting more frequent and prolonged usage than branded retail apps from Starbucks, Walmart, Walgreens, Kroger and Safeway.

The numbers from Nielsen show that shopkick had the longest average time spent in the app per month at 2 hours and 37 minutes. Shopkick also had the most sessions per month per user with 22.1 and the longest session length at 7.1 minutes.

Overall, Nielsen ranked shopkick as the 34^th most widely-used app out of one million mobile apps reviewed.

Mobile loyalty, payments converge
Since launching in August 2010, shopkick reports that it has driven more than $300 million in revenue to its alliance of retail partners and brands, with more than $200 million in 2012 alone.

Shopkick has also driven more than 17 million verified walk-ins to stores, 29 million product scans and millions of transactions.

Shopkick reports that users average over 100 products viewed per day since the app was redesigned last fall.

“In 2013, I think we will see a shift towards integration of loyalty and mobile payments,” Mr. Roeding said. “Shopkick believes that a consumer’s loyalty and convenience is key to customer retention for businesses.

“Whether or not a company chooses to embrace mobile to enhance customers’ mobile and physical worlds will define success or failure,” he said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York