As you walk along the high street, your mobile phone rings. You look to see who is calling and it is the shop you are standing next to, urging you in to check out their half-price deals.

It is not going to happen tomorrow — but it could soon as a new generation of mobile phone technology and services provides retailers with innovative ways to lure customers away from the internet and back into their shops.

Jace Tyrrell, operations manager for the New West End Company, a trade body that represents 600 shops in Oxford Street, Regent Street and Bond Street in Central London's retail heart, says that the group is investigating a system that sends text messages advertising bargains and special offers in shops close to the customer, or alerts them to events.

“We need to look at new ways of enticing in shoppers. The London market, in particular, is younger and more tech-savvy. I think mobile phone technology is going to play a big role in the future of retail,” he said.

Mr Tyrrell said that the group was in talks with retailers and mobile phone operators to work out how to operate such a service. “The technology is already in your pocket,” he said. “We just have to bring it into the retail sphere.

“With retailers going under, it's now about the bottom line and getting money in the tills. We get two million visitors a year to the West End, so if this kind of service can get people to spend just 5 to 10 per cent more, that's significant.”

The humble barcode is also transforming the shopping experience. So long hidden on the underside of frozen pea packets and milk cartons, the barcode has recently taken on a new lease of life. The G1, which is the first mobile phone to run Google's mobile phone software, has an application that scans barcodes, using the inbuilt camera, and then tells the user the cheapest place near by that they can find the product. There are also services being developed that allow mobile phones to guide customers to bargains in their area. The user types the product that they want into their mobile and it will tell them not only where they can find it and at what price, but also lead the person to the shop, sat-nav style.

Another type of barcode is starting to appear as a tool in marketing campaigns. Rather than traditional barcodes made up of lines, so-called QR (which stands for quick response) codes or 2D barcodes are formed from a series of black and white dots. Train a mobile phone's camera on the image and the dots act like a barcode, sending a coded message to the phone, which gives the consumer access to online content through their phone's internet browser. In short, it saves all that fiddly www. typing.

NeoMedia, a technology company, has run 2D barcode campaigns with Papa John's, the pizza chain, in the United States, and Nokia in Austria and is in talks with companies in Britain. In the case of Papa John's, the company sent out flyers with 2D barcodes printed on them. Once scanned, customers were directed to the Papa John's website, where they uploaded some basic information, such as their age and address, and in return received a free pizza.

Iain McCready, chief executive of NeoMedia, argues that by engaging customers and getting information from them, 2D barcode campaigns give retailers more control and offer a more sophisticated form of advertising. In Britain, Pepsi, City AM, the free financial newspaper, and Yell, which owns Yellow Pages, have embraced the technology. When the barcode is scanned, users are sent to the company's website.

Analysts caution, however, that widespread adoption of these mobile technologies could be two to three years away. “People need the latest mobiles to scan barcodes and take-up is still very small,” Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at CCS Insight, said. “It may be hard to convert the average consumer to these services on mobile devices.”

Christine Bardwell, technology retail analyst for Datamonitor, said that barcode scanning had been very big in Japan but that companies might be reluctant to invest in new technology in today's environment: “The budget will tend to go on cutting costs. Investment will have to go on the back-burner.”

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