Institute For The Future

ShopKeep Upends Retail IT With Cloud Services

 

At a mixer for The Hive at 55, a new coworking space launched recently by the Downtown Alliance here in Manhattan, I accidentally met one of the employees of a new startup called ShopKeep. Founded by ex-PWC technology consultant turned wine store-entrepreneur Jason Richelson, the project grew out of the retail entrepreneur's frustration with available point of sale and retail customer management systems.

My love for Richelson's store, the Greene Grape (named after the Brooklyn neighborhood that housed his first store, Fort Greene) aside, this struck me as a great example of lightweight innovation on the web being embedded in what is traditionally a very bricks-and-mortar business. Using his small retail empire as a prototyping lab and rapidly deploying new services via cloud computing infrastructure, ShopKeep has the potential to become a fast-evolving platform with broad retail applications. While still in Beta, I fully expect to see mashups with other retail-relevant web services - the Greene Grape already offers great Mayor specials for FourSquare users, and I'm sure they will plug ShopKeep deep into Foursquare's API.

Women's Wear Daily has good coverage on ShopKeep, here are a couple of highlights:

• the service is hosted on Amazon EC2 for reliability, security and scalability
• fully PCI-compliant
• "plans to add social media features soon but is still deciding what they will be. For example, when a retailer adds an item to inventory, she could click and automatically export a photo and description to Twitter or another social site, enabling consumers to see it almost immediately."
• "Another possibility is a news ticker that automatically searches the Internet for mentions of products and descriptions in inventory — so the storekeeper would get an alert if, say, The New York Times ran a story about an item in stock, such as United Bamboo's limited edition cat calendar. Then she could blog about it and link to the Times article.
• Pricing will be around $50/mo for one register. No proprietary on-site terminal is needed, it all runs on the web.