Mobile commerce toy and grocery shops are becoming especially successful.
Stores and shopping malls made out of images and QR codes are becoming the next big thing in the trend toward virtual shops and mobile commerce as a whole, as they seem to be popping up in a growing number of cities.
Companies are seeing the chance for profit in stores with nearly no space required and no physical merchandise.q
Instead, they are made up of poster displays of the products that are available, and QR codes that are associated with them and that can be scanned with smartphones in order to make a purchase. The entire mobile commerce experience is simply a digital version of shopping in a real store. The consumer simply needs to have a look at the items that he or she would like to purchase, scan to add them to a virtual shopping cart, and then complete the purchase by checking out.
Scanning the virtual store QR codes can be accomplished with any free or paid scanner app.
Once the items have been purchased, they will be delivered to the consumer’s home within a matter of hours or days, depending on the product and the virtual store’s policies. This trend got started in 2009, and since that time they have been spreading quickly all around the world. They have been found in many locations in the United States, Canada, Korea, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Ireland, Argentina, Chile, and others.
Singapore and Toronto, Canada have been the locations with some of the most common locations for these QR code shopping malls to appear. The most common have been for grocery and toy stores, but others have also made their mark. In Toronto, for example, Well.ca had a massive virtual store in April 2012 at Union Station, the city’s largest commuter train subway station which sees over 200,000 commuters every day. According to Well.ca, this was a tremendous success and it considerably increased the sales that they experienced from the displays as well as from the virtual store through its advertising effect.
Now, Walmart and Mattel will be headed to the same location to create a virtual toy store based on QR codes in the hopes of being equally as successful.
