Text Your Mall To Find Sales and Reserve Products With Nearby Now
Want to find out what’s on sale at your local mall and/or your favorite mall store right now? NearbyNow has linked up over 200 malls around the US to its SMS based sales finder and product search. Shoppers can text the 2-letter code of their favorite mall to 632729 and get a listing by reply text of what stores have a specific product (like that hard-to-find hot video game) in stock or get a more general list of all the stores in the mall with sales going on. Or just text the local mall code and the word DEALS to 632729 for the list of sales and special deals.
NearbyNow founder and Director of Integration Technoloy Josh Schaefer describes the service this way, “You can search for the particular product or item you are looking for, find the variety of stores that have it, browse through, find the item, fill out a form, request for our concierge service to call the store, see if the item is available, and put a hold on it.”
“Think of it as a true mall concierge service. If you walk in, things are waiting for you.”
Schaefer details, “we have the ability to have consumers search the mall by texting in the mall’s short code, but also allow consumers to do the reserve process…We treat it as a claim check of sorts” NearbyNow shoppers can use texting for effortless, mobile shopping and can augment their mall trip by knowing the exact location and price of what they are looking for. Shoppers can also subscribe to weekly shopping alerts that they receive each Friday afternoon (1PM PST).
The text search is an innovative idea, but in practice I found that it requires too many text exchanges to satisfy my impulse shopper instinct. I found my local mall code with no problem (see how to find yours below), and requested a list of all the deals available by texting NM DEALS to 632729. Nearby Now sent back a list of all the Natick Mall stores with sales (23 of them!) in 3 text messages. To get the actual details on sales at a specific store, I had to text back the number of that store. Some stores responded with a list of items (more text messages, but at least I could see the details and prices right away). Others like Gamestop responded with a general message “Save up to 50% off selected games. See store for details” Not much of an incentive to get in the car and drive to the mall there. A suggestion for NearbyNow — how about including the direct phone number of the local store in the text message response and including a “click to call” feature?
A full list of NearbyNow-affiliated malls and their codes is available at http://www.nearbynow.com/sms/
Add comment June 16th, 2008
