“You aren’t just a shopper these days, you’re a digitally empowered customer and the Apple Watch is going to revolutionize retail while also helping boost ‘a revival’ of traditional offline stores, Retale CEO, Christian Gaiser told me,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
“Retale is a location-based mobile platform/app that acts as a connection between customers and the stores they use,” Evans writes. “Customers get to browse for good deals, find local stores, get discounts and much more. Retale’s Apple Watch app is the first/only app of this kind that’s going to be available the day the watch ships, promises Retale.”
‘Retale sees the Apple Watch as a significant driver for the evolving digital customer journey and will release its app soon after the Apple product ships next month,” Evans writes. “The retail industry stands at the digital crossroads, and the Apple smartwatch will help spring things forward. That’s just one of the industries the Apple wearable may help transform.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote of Apple Watch at the end of last year:
Apple Pay alone will sell the device.
ApplePay is a big step in the US, but in Canada, it’s almost commonplace to tap your card. I look forward to the anonymity of ApplePay, but tap to pay isn’t a paradigm shift here. Note: It’s limited to $100 transactions for tap to pay.
Pseudo-anonymity. What Apple calls the Device Account Number remains the same for all transactions using your device. During a sale though the *transaction ID* is unique, so even if the communication is intercepted it can’t be “replayed” to buy anything else.
I’m not sure if the store gets the entire DAN or just the last 4 digits or some such. If the latter (and really there’s no need for them to get more, since the transaction with the full DAN is already verified by the payment processing system), there’s a max of 10,000 possible combinations… not enough info to build any sort of usable tracking database.
🍎watch, 🍎pay, ibeacon..
Everyone?
debit card use, not tied to Visa or MasterCard networks, is also very common in Canada.
One of MANY reasons a high percentage of existing iPhone owners will adopt Apple Watch. Think about it… Even if only 5% of potential customers (with iPhone 5 or later) decides to buy an Apple Watch, Apple sells over 20 million. What if it’s 10% or 20%? These are potential customer who are already enthusiastic Apple customers.
The way you put it, those sales numbers make some sort of sense and not actually unreasonable, but I think AppleWatch is going to need at least a few killer apps that users can’t do without.
Why go out and buy some device that’s just a minor extension to a device you already have in your hand and in most cases those apps would run just as well on an iPhone (less AppleWatch bio-sensors)? I won’t be convinced until I try it because I simply can’t imagine it. I can easily buy a $350 model to play with but I can’t figure out if 20 million consumers will find an actual need for one.
My money is on Apple because I know Apple understands marketing, so I’ll just rely on Apple to deliver even if I can’t imagine 10 million units being sold in a year. Hardly anyone is interested in Android smartwatches so I figured consumers aren’t really interested in wearables. I would have said the same thing about the iPad because tablets sales before the iPad were abysmal. Apple knows better than I do so I rely on Apple’s judgment.
The way I put is reality. If you just think “20 million,” it seems like a very large number. If you think about it in terms of the behavior of individual iPhone owners, then multiply a few hundred million, 20 million is just the beginning.
> just a minor extension to a device you already have in your hand
It’s not “already in your hand.” It’s in your pocket, and for the “big” iPhones, it’s probably in your handbag or backpack. The “killer apps” are all the EXISTING iPhone apps that people can’t do without. They will be quickly updated (many are being updated before release date) to have Apple Watch features, to enhance the user’s iPhone experience. Once iPhones owners begin seeing clever features in the apps (that they already use every day) that are for Apple Watch, they’ll want one too.
Apple does not need every iPhone owner to feel this way. There will probably be half-a-BILLION iPhone (5 and later) owners during Year One of Apple Watch. I takes only 1-in-25 of those iPhone owners to sell 20 million Apple Watches. And 1-in-25 seems ridiculously conservative.
App idea:
A person is browsing on the Internet using their iPhone or iPad and notices a product they might be interested in owning. In this case, the product is new or in development and will be available sometime in the future. The person saves the product to a cloud-based wish list by long-pressing the product image.
A few months pass by and the person is out and about. They drive near a store where the newly released product is available and the app informs the user on their Apple Watch that they are x distance from the product. The user says “map it” and a map with directions appear on the Apple Watch. If the user has CarPlay the map will appear here.
The consumer walks into the store and beacons or some other method triangulate the user’s position. The map on the Apple Watch switches to the store layout and leads the person to the exact location of the product.