Lightbank-funded Walk.by App is Scaling Back

Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.

The Chicago-based Walk.by app will be scaling back its business starting this week. Over 150 retailers like Milk Handmade, Roslyn, and Art Effect using the app will be able to continue to post to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and customers will be able to continue to find your items through the walkby iPhone app, however, we will no longer be processing orders and issuing shipping labels. This in-turn means the retailers will have to do more work to process customer orders, making Walk.by harder to use on both the retailer side and consumer side.

In an email sent to retailers this week, founder Joshua Hernandez writes, "Our vision was one of connectedness through technology and to build a bridge between the real brick and mortar stores and online. Despite the response to the consumer app has been great with thousands of things being followed, we have failed to get the live engagement we needed to make sure the users keep coming back to the service and eventually become customers. Because of this we feel we need to step back and evaluate if walkby can reemerge as we envisioned."
· Walk.by [Official Site]
· New App Takes Boutique Window Shopping to the Next Level [Racked]
· Lightbank [Official Site]