Duty Free Gets A Lot Easier With a Brand New Smartphone App - IFSA Duty Free Gets A Lot Easier With a Brand New Smartphone App - IFSA
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Duty Free Gets A Lot Easier With a Brand New Smartphone App

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Image via simpliflyapp.com

APEX Insight: SimpliFly hopes to simplify the duty-free airport experience with an app that lets travelers shop at any airport, anytime – and delivers the goods to wherever they’re going.

Buy Then Fly, Or Fly Then Buy
So you’re flying from New York to London, you jet-setter, you. At the moment you have two choices if you want to shop at the Duty Free: 1) Arrive way early, or 2) Arrive on time, and hope against hope for a quick journey through security.

Upcoming smartphone app SimpliFly changes the status quo by flipping it on its ear: Shop before you even leave for the airport and have your swag waiting for you when you arrive. Better yet, save the legroom for your legs and instead shop at the airport at which you’ll land. SimpliFly founder Hongbo Sun says, ” The last-minute airport shopping experience is a hassle. SimpliFly is reinventing airport shopping.” No longer confined to the two-hour period before your flight, Sun says that your new window for shopping will extended to “anytime and anywhere.”

You’ll be able to search participating airport retail options and either buy right away (YOLO!) or add products to your wish list for purchase next time you fly. This goes beyond last-minute gifts or fancy bottles of booze: For some, bigger-ticket items such as laptops or cameras are far less expensive abroad than at home, so an international flight provides a Black Friday-like opportunity to score a deal.

Contrails and Data Trails
Sun describes SimpliFly as “a B2B2C [business to business to customer] innovation.” The traveler gets convenience and choice, but airport authorities and retailers get something out of the deal as well: that sweet, sweet Big Data. When we move through digital space we leave footprints, and our habits are extremely valuable to retailers. If you keep buying a certain type of product or spend a large amount of money in your airport shopping, retailers can tailor their messages (and personalized deals) to your habits.

Airport retailers can also keep tabs on buying trends. So, for example, and this is strictly hypothetical, a certain Tokyo airport doesn’t completely run out of Japanese whiskey when a certain APEX Experience contributor is on his way through.

Beyond data collection, says Sun, a smooth user interface will lead to incremental revenue increases as well as higher conversion rates. Basically, we’ll buy stuff if it’s easy to do so, and we’ll probably spend more as well.

Make it Easy
The idea of an airport-shopping app is not new, says Sun. The problem was that different airport authorities had standalone apps that an individual flyer wouldn’t use. The experience only becomes easy when the flyer can whip out her phone, tap one app, and shop any airport. Consider your music-listening habits: Would you rather use one app per record label, or Spotify?

The future of online, said Sun, is mobile, and an app will live or die by its user experience design. SimpliFly, as you may have already guessed, will be mobile-only: “Mobile commerce is the future, not [just] eCommerce.”

Based in Ireland, SimpliFly’s team has experience in high-end brands, cloud computing, and airline point-of-sale software. Whether in love with the idea itself or just sick of racing through Duty Free at breakneck speed, Google for Entrepreneurs has taken a shine to SimpliFly: the project won Dublin Startup Weekend 2014.

Sun says, “There’s a whole pipeline of features we could add to the SimpliFly app, but the core is: Shop with convenience, multiple choices and easy collection.”

Sun tells us that SimpliFly is very close to completion, and will be launching very soon for iOS and Android.