Scanning Coke or Water? Why?
When we first released ShopSavvy on Android we had lots of users complain that when they scanned the barcode on their Snickers Bar or Diet Coke they didn’t get a result. Our answer? Why are you scanning Snickers and Coke? The answer was fairly straightforward – scanning is fun. At the end of the day ShopSavvy was designed as a FREE application to enable a user to scan the barcode of high value items that tend to be sold at very different prices in a local area and online. What are we good at?
- Books, DVDs and Video Games (represent 25% of our scans)
- Consumer electronics (represent 50% of our scans)
- Soft goods, groceries, health and beauty items ((25% of our scans)
Why do we ‘suck’ at groceries? First, it is difficult to get grocery stores to share pricing and inventory data. Primarily because most grocery retailers don’t have the technology to support a live feed, but also because they are concerned about price transparency (go into a major chain and look at pricing for milk and eggs in urban areas and compare it suburban areas, you will be surprised). The second reason we ‘suck’ is simply because barcodes on food items are HARD to read. They are often on flexible plastic packages or curved bottles and our current version struggles scanning these items.
The WORST thing is that most people try out ShopSavvy by scanning a bottle of water or a candy bar. If that is all you try you miss out on the real power of ShopSavvy. Being able to determine online and local price and inventory for millions of items from thousands of retailers is what is great about ShopSavvy. Of course, despite this post (and others like it) users will judge us on food items and as a result we are working on a) improving our coverage of groceries and b) improving our ability to scan hard to reach barcodes.
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Very cool application! Groceries should be a major part of Shop Savvy. All consumers buy groceries and spend thousands of dollars on them every year. Being able to compare prices between Safeway, Giant, Harris Teeter and Wegmans is VERY useful. You should add the ability for users to report and share pricing data from their local store rather than depending on grocers to provide it for you. You should also add a way for users save the price in their device for comparison later.
Planning a user generated data feature – a little harder than it looks due to the fact that users hold us responsible for the results we publish. We need to be able to mark it as user generated. Also, thinking about how to time out the data is important. Anyway, we are working on it. Thanks for the comment.
This app was recommended to me, I was told that it was the best app EVER… I agree it’s really cool, but it really isn’t all that useful to me the way it is currently designed. I was hoping to use it to compare prices of the higher priced items that I buy on a regular basis (toiletries, laundry products, household cleaners, OTC medications, etc). But when I scan the products that I use, it only brings up 1 maybe up to 3 local locations, and rarely are the locations anywhere that I’m going to be shopping (Target, Wal-Mart, Kroger). I understand the issue of the stores not reporting the prices, but it would be nice it the users could report the prices that they find. If I’m looking for my laundry detergent, I would like to know which of my local stores might have it on sale that week. Using this app for shopping for electronics is an ok use, but honestly, if I’m looking to buy electronics, I’m not out in the stores where I can scan bar codes, I’m going to sit at home and compare prices on the internet.
Shelly, the hardest thing to provide local prices on are groceries. Why? The retailers won’t provide them to us. On the other hand retailers who sell consumer electronics, books, DVDs, video games are happy to provide us inventory and pricing data. These items tend to be much higher cost than groceries and offer a better chance for ShopSavvy to help you save.
We are adding features like coupons, rebates, health/safety information that might make scanning groceries more interesting, but I am afraid there is nothing we can do about groceries.
[...] apps do, so I guess you missed the part that specifically says to not try to scan everyday stuff. Big in Japan | Scanning Coke or Water? Why? Maybe you should read up on how to remove apps from your phone and get rid of these crappy [...]
Why not create an option / separate app for identifying items, but not searching price.. Would be a reasonable solution for grocery items. I just want to be able to build a database of items I regularly buy. Just have the items identified then saved to a list that can be exported, or something
Working on it.
Here in the UK most large grocery retailers have online shops where customers can order things from their local store for home delivery. If the grocers won’t give you the price data why not just sign up for their websites and scrape it?
Website scraping combined with user provided prices could allow you to quickly build up a large database for groceries. I’d suggest some OCR of shelf tags too so a customer could just scan the barcode and the shelf tag to submit price data without having to type anything. You could use GPS to identify the store (and hence the format of the shelf tag).
If OCR fails, leverage your users to catch mistakes. Verify whether someone has scanned the wrong shelf tag for an item by showing the shelf tag image to the next few customers who query that item – they should be able to read off the tag whether it corresponds to the correct item and give it a thumbs up or down.
Groceries should also use “fuzzy” searching. e.g a scan of a pack of muffins should allow the user to also see the prices for other brands of muffins in their area.
Take a look at http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/ a mobile app that uses data from that site + user submissions would be a killer app for me.
Funny topic. Well I’ve tried the app and I quite like it. I understand the issue with groceries, though I do agree having at least some general coverage would of course make the app better. Though even without it, this is a cool app. Scanning, manual entry (though I’ve had a couple of books read incorrectly; perhaps new issues of numbers?), saved items, alerts? Man. The page browsing and the reviews are icing on the cake.
I understand about the difficulty of comparing grocery items. However, an additional feature you may want to add is bring up the nutritional value of the item that is scanned. Why scan a Snickers bar (that doesn’t have the nutritional values on the wrapper, or other food product that tells you to go to their website or call their toll-free number to get the nutritional value) you can just bring that information up by scanning. Just a thought… Your app has so much more potential…