In light of the recent sale of Milo.com to ebay for $85MM I thought it might be a good time to reveal the progress of our user generated experiment. With the release of ShopSavvy 4 on the iPhone we gave users the ability to add missing items, missing pictures, missing titles, missing local retailers and/or missing local prices. We also empowered users to edit existing products, pictures, titles, retailers and prices. Before I share the results I thought I would explain why we added these user generated features.

The Problem: First Scan Failure. When a user downloads ShopSavvy for the first time it is likely they are at their home or office. Their first impulse is to scan any barcode they can find. These include barcodes on bottled water, Diet Coke, hand sanitizer and food items. When we designed ShopSavvy we thought users would want to scan products that had big price differences between local retailers. We thought by revealing the price differences in Plasma TVs, DVDs, book and video games our users would save a lot of money with the application. We didn’t spend anytime trying to get prices on bottled water, Diet Coke or hand sanitzier. How much could you save on a Diet Coke? We didn’t think it mattered. In any event, most grocery stores and convenience stores aren’t willing to share their product and pricing data with us anyway. Ironically, lots (perhaps as many as 20%) test ShopSavvy on the bottle of water on their desk and when we a) don’t know what the product is, b) get the product wrong and c) don’t have any local retailers or prices they assume ShopSavvy is broken. We desperately needed a way to resolve this issue and decided to turn to our users for a solution.

The Result: LOTS of User Generated Content. Users have contributed content on more than 127,50 products in the last 30 days. We have millions of items in our database, but these contributions are of the products that are the hardest to get. Remember these contributions are not from our Android users who outnumber our iPhone users 5 to 1 (we are rolling this out to Android users in the coming weeks). The vast majority of user generated products are grocery items – perhaps 90% or more. The most popular stores for user generated content? Walmart, CVS, Walgreens and 7/11.

When we began the user generated experiment we were hopeful it would fix the ‘first scan’ problem, but we had no idea it would result in such a rich and useful set of local product inventory and price data. ShopSavvy users represent an army of millions of savvy shoppers willing to contribute information to their fellow shoppers – think Wikipedia for products. Unlike a website like Milo.com whose users are trapped at home with no ability to help build Milo’s database, our users are standing in stores with a barcode scanner in their hands ready, willing and able to help grow our product, price and inventory database – at the end of the day they are really helping each other get the best deal on the products they buy.