A new online “Mealbox” widget from grocery and consumer products retail chain Meijer Inc., which lets customers create shopping lists of grocery items on their computer desktop or personal web page, is driving up use of online coupons redeemed in stores, says Corbin de Rubertis, a retail strategy expert who developed the widget at e-commerce technology and services provider Fry Inc.

De Rubertis, a principal in Fry’s consulting services unit, worked with Grand Rapids, MI-based Meijer to develop the Mealbox tool as a way to monetize a widget that shoppers would find useful. “We brainstormed about how to produce a hard-working and monetized widget that would justify a shopper’s spending time with a retail brand,” he says.

About 50% of widget users redeem the coupons, resulting in a higher redemption rate than Meijer has realized through more costly methods of circulating printed coupons, de Rubertis says. Several thousand Meijer customers have begun using the Meijer Mealbox widget since it was launched earlier this spring, spending on average from 20 minutes to an hour using the tool to browse recipes and products and build shopping lists. As a user creates a shopping list, any available coupons are automatically attached to the list with bar codes that can be printed out and redeemed in a store.

Shoppers have several options in where to access the widget, which can be copied from Meijer.com or MLive.com for placement on a personalized iGoogle page, a personalized page on Facebook.com, or a shopper’s own blog. MLive.com is a general content site providing news and advertising in affiliation with several Michigan newspapers.

In addition to building shopping lists with coupons, the Mealbox widget includes features for e-mailing content to friends or forwarding to social networking and sites such as Del.icio.us, Twitter.com and StumbleUpon.com. The social networking connection is designed to get maximum exposure for both Meijer and its coupon partners, de Rubertis says.

Although Meijer only provides coupons through the widget for in-store coupon redemption, the widget can also support online coupon redemption, de Rubertis says. (Meijer sells several categories of consumer products online, but sells groceries only through its stores.)

The cost to develop the widget runs about $30,000 to $50,000, plus ongoing fees that can take any of multiple forms such as cost-per-thousand coupons, customer cost-per-acquisition or a revenue-sharing model, de Rubertis says.

In addition to its e-commerce site at Meijer.com, Meijer operates 182 “supercenters” selling both groceries and several categories of consumer products throughout Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky.

Filed under: High Tech