Today we are excited to offer you a new feature on Kickscout designed to better assist you with your shopping. It is called “Products Nearby”.
You know all those cool products you and your friends discover online? Now with Products Nearby, Kickscout lets you know which of those products you can shop for when you visit any mall, shopping plaza, or department store.
Located in the side menu of the Kickscout app, Products Nearby identifies the store you are currently shopping at (or any stores closeby) and matches it up with the products you and your friends have Kicked online with Kickscout.
Now your online shopping is better connected to your in-store shopping.
Check it out. We hope you like it.
Enjoy,
The Kickscout team
Kickscout.com
Hi Kickscout shoppers!
Your community of shoppers is GROWING! We recently launched a new update to Kickscout making it possible for you and your friends to shop as a team online and in local stores. We’re thrilled to share that since the update, the number of Kickscout shoppers has doubled every month. Check out this chart showing your community’s growth!
We know this is the start of something great. The more people who join the Kickscout community of shoppers, the more cool products you can discover on Kickscout. Thousands of products have been added and new products are being added each day.
Let your friends in on the fun of shopping as a team.
Share Kickscout with friends on Facebook
- Or -
Invite them directly
login to Kickscout.com and click the “Find Friends” button.
Not bad considering Kickscout hasn’t officially launched out of beta yet. ;) That will be coming soon.
Enjoy!
The Kickscout Team
Today we are kicking off a new campaign on Kickscout called “Kick, Scout, or Buy”. We are doing this to highlight our most relevant and popular products as well as to highlight how Kickscout can help you shop for these items.
Here is how it works.
We’ll post on our Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and Pinterest pages a popular product and ask if you would Kick, Scout, or Buy the product.
Kick if you want to share the online product with your friends
Scout if you want to share a hands-on in-store review of the product with your friends
Buy if you love the product so much you just want to buy it right away!
This should be fun! To kick off this campaign, we’ll start with one of our personal favorite brands The North Face. So, here we go…
Would you Kick, Scout, or Buy this shweet North Face Hoodie?
Hey Kickscout community!
We are excited to let our growing community of Kickscout users in on some exciting upcoming news. Kickscout is going to be coming out of beta soon! We have been quietly building Kickscout with your help over the last 8 months. During that time, we have evolved from an app that just takes pictures of products in stores (ha! remember those days?), into a complete online shopping site like none other. If fact, we believe, Kickscout is the first shopping website to combine in-store shopping with the online shopping experience.
Kickscout is shopping as a team. Kick products from online. Scout products in stores. Buy products from anywhere. All this in a fun, social, team shopping experience.
If you haven’t been to Kickscout.com in a while, we think you’ll be surprised at what you’ll see. Here is a sneak peek!
We hope you enjoy the new Kickscout shopping experience. Login and see what we are talking about! Also, look for our upcoming launch announcement. We owe this all to you!
Thank you,
The Kickscout team
Kickscout - Shop as a team
Kick. Scout. Buy.
Thank you for a great 2012. The Kickscout team wishes you and all of the Kickscout beta users a happy new year. We are very thankful that you signed up for Kickscout beta and gave us the chance to hear from you. We have been listening closely to your feedback and you can expect some big improvements in 2013.
New look and feel to the Kickscout website and apps
Yep, we know. The design of the website and apps is lacking so we brought in the professionals to redo everything. This update is top priority and will roll-out first thing in 2013.
Web features to allow you to better shop for things you find online
Online shopping is just as important as in-store shopping. Our goal is to create the best shopping experience period. In-store shopping has a lot of benefits but also has its drawbacks and online shopping has its benefits and drawbacks as well. We are aiming to create a shopping experience that combines the benefits of the two.
Social features that will allow you to shop as a team with your friends and family
Shopping is better when you have the opinions, insight, retail knowledge, and even the purchasing power of your friends and family with you as browse and decide which items you want to buy. New Kickscout features will aim to allow you to benefit from your own personal network of shopping friends who can help.
Maybe even a new Kickscout logo too.
The Kickscout bee? Yeah. It just doesn’t match what we do. Well, it does if you make the connection of a scout bee. Other than that, it’s image gets lost to those looking for a shopping app and website. Expect to see something more relevant to what we offer.
We are very excited for 2013 and hope to continue working with you on making Kickscout the best mobile and online retail service for you. As always, let us know what you think at support@kickscout.com.
Happy Scouting!
The Kickscout Team
The driving force behind building Kickscout is to get retail stores on an equal playing field to online ecommerce sites who can easily take advantage of the social sharing, affiliate networks, and content curation sites like Pinterest. Retail stores are threatened so much by these other shopping apps that we are hearing stories of Kickscout users being asked by retailers to stop using Kickscout in their stores. One of our users sent us an email about getting KICKED OUT of Victoria’s Secret.
got KICKED OUT of Victoria’s Secret tonight!! The manager ACTUALLY demanded I DELETE the photo! That’s AFTER I explained what Kickscout could DO for her business…..
Sorry—- this is really frustrating when you’re trying to promote the business THEY ARE WORKING FOR!!!! acccck!
Above is the Christmas Victoria’s Secret lingerie Jeanann was scouting for her friends while the store was kicking her out.
We reached back out to Jeanann to elaborate on why she felt so passionate about this, she replied:
Has anyone out there NOT heard countless stories about the “difficult retail environment” and the concerns over “4th quarter retail numbers missing the mark?” Add to that, the fact that many chains are feeling the economic pinch from the high expense of operating brick-and-mortar locations, and you’d think they would WELCOME a little assistance from a retail aid like my favorite new app “Kickscout!”
But no—- instead of appreciating the fact that I am trying to tempt my sister into buying the same Michael Kors handbag that I just snagged, or stimulate some interest in a giant “group gift” assortment of lingerie for a bridal shower, I am kicked out of the store after I refused to delete the photo I uploaded to Kickscout! Stop the insanity, retailers—- this is NUTS! If you want us to buy from you, stop being so paranoid about what technology can do TO you, and embrace what it can do FOR you!!
As an app developer, you’ve got to love passionate emails like this. This user understands the greater problem and our solution. We understand her frustration as a user but also don’t blame retailers entirely for this. From their standpoint, they are under attack. Other shopping apps are designed to steal their customers away from them. They probably assumed Kickscout was one of those apps. This story just shows how much retailers fear the existing shopping apps. The impact to their business is real and the problem is great. It will take some time to educate these retailers that Kickscout is their friend but we are up for the challenge. We are here to help. All shopping can be fun and social, not just online shopping.
Happy Scouting,
The Kickscout Team
Download Kickscout
Hey Scouters!
We here at Kickscout wanted to let you in on our latest improvements. If you haven’t visited Kickscout in a while, then we think you’ll be surprised with the changes. We are listening to your feedback and are focused on building what you really want in an in-store shopping app. So let us show you the new updates.
New Design
For starters, feedback from the Kickscout community was overwhelming in favor of a better design and interface. To fix this problem, we brought in a seasoned web and app designer to the team. He is just starting now, but has already redesigned our homepage. Take a look.
Pretty slick, right? We’ll be rolling out more design updates throughout the app that will match this new polished look and feel. We want to give you an easier, cleaner, and more enjoyable experience while you shop, so stay tuned for those design updates.
New Slogan - “Be a shopping trendsetter”
For some of you early Scouters, you may notice our new slogan “Be a shopping trendsetter”. The previous slogan just didn’t message the true benefit that using Kickscout will provide you as you shop. Kickscout is about connecting you with your friends while you shop in stores. Shoppers can share and discover cool products, reviews, comments, feedback about products and share online alternatives from friends as they shop. We hope the new slogan better aligns with our vision for the product and what you told us you really want from Kickscout.
Top Trendsetter Recognition
You may also notice that we added the concept of a “Top Trendsetter”. Your favorite store will have one, and it can be you. Top trendsetters have shown to be the most influential of any customer of a store. Each time you scout a product from a store and influence your friends, you’ll earn store points that will help in your ranking as that store’s Top Trendsetter. We want to recognize your work as a shopping trendsetter. These points and “Top Trendsetter” titles are a great way to do this. Our team has experience making fun social game-like experiences, so we really think this will work well with shopping too. And who knows, maybe someday, being your favorite store’s Top Trendsetter may even get you added perks.
Online Alternatives Feature
Another feature we have added is called “online alternatives”. Many times the friends who you share your scouts with may also have a better online alternative to the product you are showing them or maybe a cheaper place to purchase the item online. To help with this, we have added the ability to share a link for an online alternative to each scout. For example, you scouted a great Calvin Klein Baby-girl’s Infant Vest with Striped Long Sleeve Top and Pants at Macy’s. Well, maybe your friends online found a cheaper alternative on Macys.com or maybe even Amazon.com.
With the new online alternatives feature, you can now all share and discuss where to get the best deals and options, in store and online.
We can’t wait to hear what you think of these updates. Email us at support@kickscout.com, tweet us @Kickscout, or Facebook us at facebook.com/kickscout
Happy Scouting!
- The Kickscout Team
Today we are announcing the public launch of the Kickscout iPhone app to the Apple App Store (get it here). Kickscout is a social shopping app for the real world. Kickscout allows you to share the in-store shopping experience with your friends and family. Think of it like Pinterest but for when you are shopping at your favorite store.
Social Shopping
Using your phone’s camera, users of the Kickscout app can take pictures of products in stores you find interesting or that you think your friends will like. You can build a product wish list or even a wedding registry. Sharing products you find while shopping in a store can be just as much fun, if not more fun, than sharing products online.
Social Buying
The really interesting part is that Kickscout isn’t just social shopping but it is also social buying. Kickscout is built on top of Wepay, a peer-to-peer payment service provider. Kickscout leverages Wepay to allow users to accept payments from friends and family for the products they find and post on Kickscout. When people find great stuff in the mall or at their favorite store, Kickscout allows them to also be a personal shopper for their entire social network. Each time a friend offers to pay for an item the user has shared, the friend can pay the user with their credit card right in the Kickscout app. The user will get the funds once they confirm they have purchased the item for the friend.
Store Loyalty
Kickscout also allows users to earn what we call “Store Points”. Store Points are a form of Kickscout currency that you can earn towards your favorite store. Cool right? Right now these points are used on your profile page to rank your top stores. In the future we plan to do a whole lot more with these points so stay tuned.
Check us out at Kickscout.com or download our apps at
Happy scouting!
The Kickscout Team
Over the last month and a half we’ve been in the midst of our Kickscout app beta rollout. Each week we’ve had a new update, a new feature, or a new social, shopping experience (see our blog for our weekly updates). The objective is to build Kickscout in plain sight, right here in the Boston tech community, for everyone to see. Why did we choose to do this?
Feature Feedback
For starters, we wanted to make sure we weren’t building the app in a vacuum. When you are building a product before it is live, you are mostly working off a checklist. This just isn’t how great software is made. Figuring out what features are important can’t happen without having a group of people providing you with feedback.
Product Messaging
Another reason for the Kickscout beta rollout is to work on the messaging of the product. Over the last 6 weeks, the vision of our product hasn’t changed, but the number of features and uses have grown. Each week we have launched a new feature and updated existing ones. We have updated our beta users each week about each new feature, but we haven’t done a whole lot in terms of our messaging.
When we launched, our messaging was that Kickscout allows you to shop for your friends and get paid. The initial messaging matched our initial feature set, but as we have rolled out our total social shopping offering, our messaging hasn’t been on par with the total Kickscout experience. This will change over the next few weeks. More to come soon.
Built In Boston
Finally, we also decided to roll out the Kickscout beta app in Boston in response to a BostInno article written by Chase Garbarino titled Is It Impossible to Launch a Consumer Tech Product in Boston? Our roots are here in Mass., and we truly believe in the local tech economy and the ability to gain traction with a population that is very shy about trying new apps. It is a challenge, but it is one that we are up for. With very little PR and zero marketing, we have been able to attract a small but very helpful team of beta testers. It is a positive sign and still an uphill battle but one that we are very excited to fight. More to come! Stay tuned.
About Kickscout
Kickscout is a social shopping app for the real world. Kickscout allows you to share the in-store shopping experience with your friends and family. Think of it like Pinterest but for when you are shopping at your favorite store. Sign up for the beta at Kickscout.com
Happy Scouting!
Michael Sheeley
Co-Founder Kickscout
