GameStop Brings Mobile Shopping Cart to Brick and Mortar

Ecommerce, omnichannel, omnichannel fulfillment, omnichannel focus, omnichannel strategy, retail, ship from store, ship to store, buying online, online shopping, GameStop, brick-and-mortarGameStop announced at the National Retail Federation’s 104th Annual Convention & Expo that its plans to use Microsoft Azure cloud platform to continue to enhance the in-store engagement of its customers in interactive, informative and entertaining ways.

GameStop will be one of the first retailers to use Azure to stream video game and promotional content direct to customer and store associate mobile devices. As a result, customers will be able to view on their smartphones and Windows tablets content from GameStop’s catalog of video games, providing a digitally immersive shopping experience within the physical store.

GameStop’s store associates will be able to access individual information for those customers who have opted in to receive and share information as part of the GTI app, empowering the associate to provide a personalized shopping experience based on the customer’s unique shopping history.

During an interview with Multichannel Merchant at the Expo, Charlie Larkin, Senior Director, Technology Innovation, at GameStop, described gaming as a content experience, and said a lot of research on gaming is done on mobile devices.

“What we wanted to do is take that research and make it even better in store,” Larkin said. “We took all these assets we built for our online and mobile properties and we exposed it in a way that can be used in the store in a fun and entertaining way, and can also immerse the customer with that content experience.”

But even more interesting is how GameStop is bringing the mobile shopping cart to the brick and mortar environment. The GameStop app offers an in-store mobile shopping cart that can be used by the customer to facilitate a faster checkout.

“So as you’re building up your shopping cart, employees can see that and be able to download it right to the POS,” Larkin said. “So as you are building your cart up we can have the product ready for you and make the checkout more seamless and convenient for the customer.”

Brendan O’Meara, Senior Director of Worldwide Retail and Consumer Goods, Microsoft Corp., told Multichannel Merchant referred to the shopping cart as an “omnibasket,” which is facilitated via Azure in-store beacons. He added that this is a first of a kind retail experience, but he doesn’t expect it to be the last of its kind.

“As often is the case, GameStop is really on the leading edge of something, but frankly, I think this is really intuitive from a consumer perspective,” O’Meara said. “This is how you want the [omnichannel customer] experience to work. Outside of maybe a little bit of messaging that comes from beacons there’s not really a full interactive experience to be exploited in retail the way that GameStop is doing it here.