Tag: quick response codes

QR code virtual stores are exploding in popularity

qr codes storeMobile 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.

QR codes help China’s leading video site’s users to go mobile

QR Codes ChinaYouku is using the smartphone barcodes to promote the use of its website by device users.

The leading video website in China, called Youku, has just added QR codes into every one of the videos on its desktop website in order to promote the use of smartphones and tablets in order to view them.

Though this may be quite a small and simple mobile marketing step, it is one that is quite creative.

The result is that each of the video pages on the Youku website – including those for its licensed movie and television show content – now features small icons that can be clicked in order to display larger QR codes. By using a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet to scan the quick response barcodes, the same video on the desktop or laptop screen will then launch in the smaller device’s browser. If the Youku app is already present on the Android or iOS device, it will launch the video in that, instead.

The QR codes lead to videos that don’t require flash, as the site is based on an HTML5 version.

Many users have already reported that scanning the QR codes have brought about successful video playing on their devices, including on Chrome for Android. They have also noted that the videos will play both vertically and horizontally. These barcodes can be scanned using any scanning app, including any of the dozens that are available for free for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry devices.

The newly merged company that is officially called Youku Tudou has recently made note of the fact that 15 percent of the traffic to its Youku website in September was from mobile devices. Liu Dele, the president of the company, has said that it is expected that this trend will experience growth “very quickly”. As the usage of the internet over mobile has now surpassed that over desktop and laptop computers as of August of last year in China, it looks as though the tipping point has already been reached and the new online focus will be on the smaller screens of smartphone and tablet devices.