Shop Today debuts first in-person shopping gallery at Westfield World Trade Center

The famed Shop Today holiday gift guide is getting a makeover as an in-person shopping experience.

The commerce arm of NBC’s Today last week debuted its first pop-up space in the Shops at the Oculus at Westfield World Trade Center that is outfitted with roughly 40 of the gift guide’s products—which include slippers, tumblers, and even a personal karaoke microphone—encased in glass that shoppers can purchase by scanning a QR code and having the product shipped straight to their home.

• The activation does not carry inventory for the sake of space, but is meant to corral tourists, visitors to the World Trade Center, and dedicated Today shoppers.
• It’s also in partnership with Amazon, and many of the products are available on the e-commerce behemoth’s website.

An in-person gallery was the “next natural iteration” for Shop Today, which has promoted content through live television broadcasts, streaming, and online since 2017, Ashley Parrish, SVP of commerce at NBC, told Retail Brew.

“We always want to make things easier for our audience, whether that is scanning a QR code or reducing the friction in between when somebody sees a product and wants to actually transact on it,” she said. “We think we’re solving a need obviously with the product curation, but also that they experienced by that use of the QR code.”

Parrish explained that an in-person pop-up was a new way to expand the brand’s reach to new customers and further tailor a product for the needs of existing consumers, which centers around three principles: meeting the audience where they are, creating an easy shopping experience, and folding the brand and experience into the day-to-day of customers who regularly watch the show.

Live for today: This year, the Shop Today Holiday Hot List is curated by a handful of Amazon influencers, who take to their social media and/or streaming platforms to promote the company’s products, in addition to Today’s usual cohort of Shop Today editors, readers, and other experts. Today earns a commission on purchases made through links in the gift guide, per its website.

• Shop Today currently has a separate activation around shoppable recipes in partnership with Walmart where a Today viewer can decide to make a recipe found during a cooking segment on the show and scan a QR code that takes them to a page on their site where they can add all the ingredients to their carts with one click.

For the in-person activation, Parrish said they’re keeping an eye on performance metrics such as foot traffic, sales, click-through conversion rates, and average order value to determine its success. She added that Shop Today would be interested in exploring another in-person shopping experience if this proves successful.

“There are certain points throughout the year where an activation like this would make sense, mostly during gift-giving holidays,” Parrish said. “So it could be Mother’s Day or Father’s Day—it could be [another] holiday. There are a number of other other ways we can editorially frame a selection of curated products.”