Foursquare users have previously been able to see nearby offers from local merchants, but they had to hunt for them on a large list. Now the deals will be aggregated and easier to find, a Foursquare rep says.
Blasting local deals via mobile seems to be catching on. AT&T late last month introduced ShopAlert, a service that sends users mobile offers from Hewlett-Packard, JetBlue and Kmart when the user is near a location where such products or services or sold. LivingSocial also rolled out this week a new feature on its mobile app that alerts consumers to local deals.
At the moment, ShopAlert is only available in four cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. LivingSocial’s is only in Washington, D.C., and Foursquare’s program is available nationally.
While Foursquare tweaked the user end of the program, it also added some functionality for vendors wanting to advertise the deals. The turnkey solution for vendors, called the Foursquare Merchant Platform, now includes a gender breakdown of checkins, a breakdown by time of day and other data that the company hadn’t shared before. As previously, the program is free to vendors.
