Check out the video:

• Price matching. In ShopSavvy 4 we made it easier to determine the price matching policies of various local retailers. Users are leveraging the price comparison data we share with them AND their newfound understanding of the store’s price matching policy to get the best deal right where they are.
• Shopping at home. In ShopSavvy 4 more than 15% of users are leveraging title search to shop at home. This is up from just 1% a year ago.
• Deals. In ShopSavvy 4 more than half of the users are using the app to find deals from retailers like The Gap, Walmart, Target, Sears, Home Depot BEFORE they shop.
• Consumer generated data. In ShopSavvy 4, thousands of users add new product, pricing and inventory data to our system – more than 24,000 new retailers have been added by users in just the last month.

• Prior to black Friday we didn’t see any scan volume in the latest, high margin electronic gadgets like LCD and 3D Televisions. Instead we were seeing LOTS of scans on older, almost obsolete plasma televisions priced very competitively. This trend is continuing. We suggested in our previous release that this might spell trouble for Best Buy. Best Buy’s earnings miss today seems support our prediction.
• The average price per scan since Black Friday is down 34% over the same period in 2009. What does this mean? Consumers are shopping for lower priced items?
• The average number of products scanned per user since Black Friday is up 75% over the same period in 2009. What does this mean? Consumers are more discerning than they were last year?
• The average time in store since Black Friday is up 22% over the same period in 2009. That does this mean? It supports the assumption that consumers are more discerning than they were last year?
• Offline to local conversion is up by 90% over the same period in 2009. We rarely saw users ‘buy it online’ when they were in a store in 2009. While not the standard use case we have seen a big jump in online purchasing.

AdOns:

Update: When we updated our SDK license we eliminated the ad-supported model in favor of the more popular ‘fee’ based models. This was a mistake, LOTS of folks like the free barcode scanner license model – we are adding BACK it as a fifth option.

Earlier this year we publicly released the barcode scanner SDK (ScannerKit) that powers ShopSavvy. We have hundreds of licensees including Consumer Reports, Walmart/Sam’s, FastMall and PriceGrabber. Our original license required that licensees include our AdOn ad framework in order to use the ScannerKit. Hundreds of you have requested an ad-free option and we decided we would change our licensing model to meet your needs.

I am pleased to announce we now have four ‘ad free’ options for licensees in addition to the ad-support model. Beginning today using the ad framework is 100% optional. General commercial licenses cost $5,000. Retailer licenses cost $5,000 and require the retailer to provide a product feed for use in ShopSavvy. Startups who have been in business less than a year and raised less than $250,000 can defer the $5,000 fee for 12 months. Finally, students and/or schools who want to license the SDK for non-commercial use can use the SDK at no cost. Here is a run down:

– Commercial Use: $5,000 upfront payment due prior to public release
- Retailer Use: $5,000 upfront payment + product/price/inventory data feed
- Startup Use: $5,000 payment deferred for 12 months
- Student/School Non-Commercial Use: No payment due (proof required)
- Ad-Supported: No cost as long as you include the Ad Framework for the life of the app

Licenses executed prior to December 13th, 2010 are still enforce and will be honored. If you are a current Licensee and wish convert to the new license please contact Alexander Muse at 214.550.2003.

In the past ShopSavvy users almost never used keyword search, but that has been changing. Our keyword search features have improved and users seem to be using ShopSavvy more and more as a discovery tool. Today keyword search represents 15% of product searches:

When reporters ask us how many retailers we have in ShopSavvy I like to cite a number we came up with back in 2009: 20,000. It is a nice round number, but it isn’t really correct. The real number is much larger. In fact, 37 days ago we began allowing ShopSavvy 4 users on the iPhone to add missing retailers and prices. Since then they have added 23,056 new stores to our system. Yep 23,056 retailers we didn’t have just 37 days ago. As our users indicate which stores they frequent we take that ‘signal’ and use it to prioritize which retailers we contact to get official price and inventory data. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.

From Nov. 1-30, smartphone users downloaded ShopSavvy 2.15 million times, including 1.4 million times on iPhone and 750,000 times on Android phones. It was the biggest month for downloads since ShopSavvy’s introduction in November 2008.

The jump in downloads can be largely attributed to the release of ShopSavvy 4 for iPhone on Nov. 1, incorporating a host of new “social shopping” features. Of the 1.4 million downloads by iPhone users in November, 400,000 were first-time downloads and 1 million were current ShopSavvy users updating to the latest version of the app.

We suspect that growing consumer awareness of barcode scanning as a comparison-shopping tool, as well as ShopSavvy’s market-leading position, also played a key role in the download increase. ShopSavvy was featured in 543 TV newscasts during Black Friday week alone, according to the monitoring service VMS.

Read today’s press release.

Alexander Muse was interviewed live on Bloomberg Television. Check it out on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glJ9moOhGkw