Given the number of ‘no junk mail’ signs plastered on letterboxes across the country, you may be surprised to learn that Australian consumers are heavy catalogue users.
This is according to Dean Vocisano, Australian manager of ShopFully, a smartphone app that houses retailers’ digital catalogues on a single platform. The information contained on ShopFully—including offers, store locations and operating hours—is geo-located, so shoppers only see stores and deals that are relevant to them.
“Consumers are starting to switch from physical catalogues to digital,” Vocisano said. “We’re capturing an audience that is highly engaged with catalogue content and typically spend more in-store.”
Established in Italy in 2010, ShopFully launched in Australia in September 2016 and currently has around one million users here. Globally, it boasts over 25 million users with roughly 300 retailers and brands signed up including Walmart, Samsung and Microsoft. Local retailers include Coles, IGA, Target and Spotlight.
ShopFully offers a digital home for retailers’ catalogues.
The platform is mainly used by retailers in the grocery, consumer electronics and department store categories, where shoppers are more likely to research online before heading into a store.
According to research from Neilsen, the app helps drive consumers into physical stores and influences the ‘intention to buy’ by up to 25 per cent.
“Physical retail touch points and human interaction are priceless and lead to a fulfilling shopping experience,” Vocisano said.
“The opportunity…is to enable physical retailers to tailor themselves to their customers’ physical needs. It’s not a question of choosing between online or offline, but instead how to combine the two to offer a seamless shopping experience.”
Most users spend around 7.5 minutes in a single ShopFully session and typically engage with three to four catalogues in that period. It is data like this that Vocisano said makes ShopFully valuable to retailers.
As a mobile-focused platform, the app is able to collect data its desktop-based competitors cannot. This includes understanding how long consumers are looking at a catalogue and the time it takes a shopper to visit a retail store after reading a catalogue.
“ShopFully allows retailers to understand what their catalogue is doing. The data available is not the type of information they could get before.”