In 2010, Boston-based AisleBuyer launched its mShop mobile commerce application that enables retailers to provide information and relevant promotional offers to consumers who are already in their store. The app also lets shoppers purchase an item without ever having to stand in a checkout line. In effect, AisleBuyer has blended the card-not-present and the brick-and-mortar shopping experiences.

“People in brick-and-mortar stores in the future will not wait in line, just like they don’t wait when they make a payment on Amazon,” predicts AisleBuyer CEO Andrew Paradise.  

For merchants that want to save a significant chunk of their business, AisleBuyer can deliver the future now.

“Fifteen to 25 percent of purchases that are abandoned in-store are because of long lines at checkout,” Paradise says. “The consumer has spent the time finding their items, they’re ready to pay for them, but they get so frustrated they give up. If that’s not low hanging fruit, I don’t know what is.”

Shoppers who use AisleBuyer’s mShop-powered smartphone app scan a product’s barcode with their phone, pay and go without ever waiting in line. They can build shopping lists, scan items to check product reviews and receive relevant promotional offers while they are in a store. Retailers offering the app also can deliver tailored promotional up-sells to their customers. Magic Beans (the specialty baby and toy store with six locations in the Boston area that was the first merchant to sign on with AisleBuyer) can, for example, instantly serve an offer for a discount on a matching diaper bag to a shopper who scans a particular stroller while they’re still in the best position to make the purchase—inside the store.

On Black Friday 2010, 15 percent of smartphone users shopping at Magic Beans’ six locations chose mobile self-checkout using the app and 60 percent of those who scanned a product ultimately made a purchase. On the same day in 2011, sales using the mobile app were up 285 percent from the year before. Throughout the year, 18 percent of all transactions in the stores were made using the mobile app.

In November 2011 AisleBuyer signed up Big Y, a grocery chain with 59 locations in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut. And, while he cannot disclose the names, Paradise says two other major grocery chains representing 2,500 stores are at various stages of deployment. Since mShop’s launch, the company also has added a “store associate” solution that turns an iPad into a POS device that accepts credit card payments.

Customers are already shopping with mobile devices, while retailers have struggled to keep up, the company says. AisleBuyer is revolutionizing the in-store shopping experience and providing brick and mortar retailers with a competitive advantage to attract shoppers and increase sales.

In April 2012 AisleBuyer was acquired by Intuit, which will leverage the AisleBuyer platform to enhance its own mobile card acceptance product, GoPayment.