As more and more customers are choosing online shopping over shopping in-store, brands need to figure out a way to add something unique to their offline purchasing experience.

Consider the reasons why a customer chooses to shop in-store over online. It’s likely that the in-store experience already offers something that online doesn’t. Perhaps it’s an offer specific to that store, or the customer service provided is worth the extra effort to travel. About 90% of all retail revenue in 2016 accounted for brick and mortar retail, so in-store shopping isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

In a previous post, we talked about how to combat “showrooming” ‒ a consumer trend that 46% of shoppers engage in and means  researching products in-store and buying them online. “Webrooming”, however, has become much more common  over the past few years, with 69% of shoppers taking part in it. Also known as ‘reverse showrooming’, it refers to the process of starting to browse  products online, but eventually completing the purchase in-store.

Despite their obtrusive character  and limited functionality, Quick Response codes have been overused in marketing over the last decade. But now they are becoming a thing of the past, thanks to the dawn of technologies like Image Recognition and Optical Character Recognition, which offer better user experience in Retail and Advertising.

It's hard to believe that it's been almost a year since we last wrote up our thoughts on Mobile World Congress. In the 2015 edition, IoT and wearables received quite a lot of attention. On the other hand, enthusiasm for VR/AR glasses seemed somewhat modest. This year, the sleeping giant woke up.

AR-Code is the free Augmented Reality (AR) mobile app that lets users capture and watch exciting digital content from all types of printed material or physical objects. Users can interact in real time and on-demand. AR-Code offers a free multimedia library of topics both on- and offline, anytime, anywhere. It's available for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.