MobiQpon has joined the growing ranks of those companies providing coupons over your mobile device. It’s free iPhone can receive and store coupons on a locally targeted basis – but does it stand up to the huge amount of competition?
First, let’s have a look at what MobiQpon does. It’s a location-based application that picks up any offers or deals being offered in your area, and displays them in a way that a cashier or scanner can redeem The idea is that if a MobiQpon user is interested in going shopping, they can pull their device out of their pocket and check out what coupons are available in the area.
MobiQpon also lets users check coupons in other areas, allowing them to plan ahead for a shopping trip and store relevant coupons in a mobile “wallet”.
The app is currently only available to iPhone and iPod Touch users, with Android and Blackberry apps planned for some time in the future.
What we think?
Whoa, déjà vu. Oh no, wait. I actually have read that before. Several times.
A service like this could be wonderful, but only if everybody is scanning the same channel. The percentage of people you are going to hit with MobiQpons is going to be tiny. It has to be an iPhone owner, near your shop, with their MobiQpon application running. Coupon services can’t afford to be quite as passive as mobile advertising needs to be. Some of the best services we’ve seen are the one’s that are selectively “push”, because at the end of the day you are offering your customers something they really want: more cash in their wallet. The problem here is that there are SO MANY alternatives to MobiQpon. Yowza is an iPhone app that provides pretty much exactly the same service. But Yowza suffers from the same “percentage of a percentage” problem. There are services launching that target all types of handset, and hit consumers when they are in store, and most interested in receiving special offers. I’m not saying MobiQpon is a bad service by any means, but it’s not particularly competitive.
