I was recently discussing online retail with a colleague  and the challenge online retailers face in proving their value to their traditional brick-and-mortar counterparts. It made me wonder why no ecommerce platform (that I know of) has added the ability to send a shopping cart to someone’s mobile phone.

Imagine you are on the Nordstrom website and you are looking at a number of outfits but you don’t want to commit to purchasing them until you can touch and feel them or even try them on. You click on a button on the website, provide them with your email address or mobile phone number and the ecommerce platform sends you a QR code with the contents of your cart. Maybe they can even schedule when they can come in to try the outfits and they could be all ready for them if not then they can just stop by one of the retail locations, walk up to a staff member to have the QR code scanned and then they could bring you the outfits you selected. This allows you to close the loop from online to offline. You could even offer them incentives to show up to a store at a particular time or day.

QR code use is growing and this may make it grow even further.

Do you know anyone trying this yet? Are you willing to be the first?

P.S. Feel free to scan in the QR code in this post 🙂

Please share if you think others would benefit.