Mobile location, navigation and stickers rolled together for shoppers

Citi Cards has launched a major new application today for mobile shoppers. The Citi Shopper is still in beta, but you can download it for Android, iPhone and Blackberry at citishopper.citi.com. And it’s only one part of a mobile shopping service suite from Citi Cards – although on closer inspection, it looks like Citi Cards has just  taken whatever it thinks might work from other people who are already working in the area.

Who are Citi Cards?

CitiGroup is probably the biggest financial group in the world – it has 260,000 employees in 16,000 offices globally. Citi Cards is just one piece of that larger group. Specifically, the part that deals with issuing credit cards. But as technology has progresses, so has Citi Cards, so it now also deals with payment services in general and in mobile technologies.

What is CitiShopper?

It’s a location application to help you shop. About the only thing you can’t actually do with the app is pay – but we’ll get to that. Citi Cards has struck a deal with mobile shopping company GPShopper to use it’s Slifter technology. It’s essentially a massive retail database, tooled to be accessed by mobile devices, and then combined with search and social networking. Here’s what Slifter does:

•    You can search for deals and promos at major retailers
•    There’s also a local search option, for products only at nearby stores
•    You can sort search results either by their price or their distance from you
•    Search results provide you with product info, pics and a map to the shop – as well as a click-to-call button
•    There’s a sort of networking function, in that you can save your search results into a Shopping List, which you can then share with friends and family

So, pretty much the entire functionality of this application has been bought from GPShopper – the only thing that Citi Cards has put in themselves is a service that reminds you of Citi credit card-specific rewards, benefits and offers. So… it’s basically just a branded service from GPShopper.

What else is Citi Cards doing?

Along with the application, Citi Cards is rolling out a sticker-based payment option for mobile. When you attach one of the MasterCard PayPass stickers to your phone, you can use it to pay for goods by waving it over a specialised reader – which about 230,000 merchants already have. For a more in-depth look at how this technology works, take a look at our recent report on the exact same technology from French company Inside Contactless.

What we think?

Citi Cards has taken the precaution of keeping an eye out for what looks like it’s working – and then doing that. As CEO Paul Galant says “Citi is constantly looking for ideas and solutions that are the right fit for our customers and their lifestyle”. But this is not a bad thing. There is plenty of room for everyone to play in this particular field. But mobile shopping is an incredibly exciting area. Particularly if you don’t like the rigours of long shopping trips, you would get great use out of well built shopping services on your mobile device. And that’s the double-whammy that Citi Card is trying to offer here, once you’re using both Citi Shopper and PayPass stickers:

Step one: decide you want something
Step two: search for it on Citi Shopper, deciding which shop you want to go on based on how cheap it is and how far you have to travel
Step three: go to shop, buy product by waving your phone over the reader

It’s a beautiful vision, and whether or not it comes true depends on a lot of factors. The most important one is the Slifter service – it has to be perfect in order for this to work. But you also need mass take up of NFC payment technologies, and general public awareness that this kind of service is available.

To get a better insight into the developing world of how mobile is changing the way people interact with the world, check out the People Tracking and Location USA conference, June 22-23, 2010 – Chicago from TheWhereBusiness