In an effort to capitalize on the iPhone’s ability to aggregate and manage information, Cerado, Inc., recently unveiled Scanaroo, an iPhone application designed to consolidate loyalty cards for ease of use.
Using the iPhone’s camera, Scanaroo is designed to take loyalty, insurance, membership and other cards people carry in their wallets, and convert them to digital form that can be stored on the iPhone for easy retrieval.
“This is something that customers can use to improve their experience and retailers benefit too,” says Chris Cåçarfi, CEO of Cerado. “For the customer, it’s greatly simplifying the things customers need to do to participate in loyalty programs because…they are able to carry around one device which they already have: the phone.”
The opportunities for retailers, Carfi says, are promising, as the application presents the ability to offer location-based services, which can enable the retailer to tailor offers from the moment the customer enters the store, rather than waiting until the point of sale. Offers made at the point of sale typically don’t impact the retailer until the next shopping trip, and that’s only if the customer comes back. Sharing relevant offers with the customer from the moment they walk in can prove extremely profitable, he says.
Advertisement
- Some of Scanaroo’s features are designed to offer users the ability to:
- Add a new card by taking a photo with the iPhone camera
- Create a unique icon for each card by simply taking a photo
- Support both bar-coded and non-bar-coded cards
- Protect the user with a 4-digit pass code that can be turned “On” or “Off”
- Enter card names and descriptions into the system
- Edit and delete cards from the system
“I think there are going to be some things that derive from existing behaviors and courting customers to a new platform, but there are all sorts of interesting opportunities that are going to come down the pipe for retailers to do new things [with mobile],” says Carfi.
