Check In While Checking Out: CardStar Adds Foursquare Integration
Mobile loyalty card application CardStar is today announcing integration with popular location-based service Foursquare in its newly updated iPhone application, CardStar 3.0. Now, as CardStar users present their mobile phones …
Context & Ripple Effects
CardStar's 3.0 release lands five months after Foursquare's growth inflection, when the service passed one million check-ins per week with its rate doubling in a month. A July 2010 RJMetrics analysis put Foursquare at five times Gowalla's size and growing faster daily, making its API the default choice for any app that wants location features.
For Foursquare itself the timing matters beyond product strategy: it raised a bridge round in June 2010 amid reports of unconfirmed acquisition talks with Facebook, so third-party integrations like this one build out its merchant-side utility while its independence remains an open question.
First-order effects
- CardStar users presenting a loyalty card at checkout can now simultaneously check in on Foursquare, tying each card redemption to a public location signal from inside one iPhone app.
- Merchants on CardStar effectively get Foursquare distribution at no integration cost of their own, since the check-in happens within the loyalty flow they already run.
Second-order effects
- Competing mobile loyalty apps face pressure to add their own location-service hooks or cede the checkout moment to whichever platform pairs rewards with social broadcasting.
- Foursquare gains a retail checkout channel that Gowalla and other check-in rivals lack, reinforcing the size gap the RJMetrics analysis documented.
Third-order effects
- If loyalty apps keep embedding check-ins, the point of sale becomes a contested acquisition surface where location networks compete to be the identity layer behind every scanned card.
- Retailers stand to accumulate linked redemption-plus-location records, pushing toward foot-traffic analytics as a standard byproduct of digitized loyalty programs.
The trend: Mobile loyalty programs are absorbing location-based check-ins, turning the retail checkout counter into a distribution battleground between competing check-in networks.