Okay, so this morning before church I stopped by Target to do some early grocery shopping. I made a point to ‘eat the dog food’ by scanning everything I was thinking about buying AND lots of stuff I had no intention of buying. I began by adding prices for a bunch of the ‘first scan’ products we see a lot (Pepsi, Coke, Dr. Pepper, Vitamin Water, Gatorade and lots of water). We had most of the ‘first scan’ items (I think I had to fix the pictures in two of them) but we didn’t have prices from Target. I added those. Next I scanned paper towels and toilet paper – lots of other folks have added prices from other stores like Tom Thumb, Walmart, Walgreens and CVS – the Target price was better. I added it and bought the paper products. Notice in the screen shot of the app to the right. For the first time we have more local stores (21) that carry a grocery item than online (4). Even more interesting the local prices are better than the online prices – Wow!
Lots of local retailers (typically Mom & Pops) want to get their products and prices into ShopSavvy, but they don’t have the budget or expertise needed to provide us with an API (an electronic feed of their products). With the release of ShopSavvy 4 on the iPhone, any retailer with an iPhone can scan in their products and prices directly into our system by taking advantage of our Authorized Retailer™ program.
- Add any product with a UPC or EAN
- Add a custom image of the product
- Add a custom title of the product
- Add a current price of the product
- Add up-to 100 product attributes
To participate in our Authorized Retailer™ program fill out this short form. Once you have been approved for the program (typically within a few hours) you can begin to add products to ShopSavvy and they will INSTANTLY be seen by shoppers near your stores. While any user can add a product, price and retailer – his submission won’t necessarily be accepted or seen by all users. Authorized Retailer™ submissions are always accepted immediately without review or moderation.
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.
We are pretty excited here at the ShopSavvy offices that Milo.com was acquired by eBay for $75MM. Milo.com allows a user to search for a product and find out which local retailers carry the product, which have it in stock and how much they are selling it for. It is like ShopSavvy without the mobile app. Our PriceNark system serves as the backend of ShopSavvy and works in much the same way:
- Consuming direct feeds from retailers that include price and inventory
- Consuming indirect feeds from third parties
- Scraping the web + shopping cart insertion to determine price and local availability
For approximately $85MM eBay was able to buy RedLaser and Milo.com, which combined are basically the same as ShopSavvy. From a comparable valuation perspective we are pretty happy with the numbers, but we are also concerned. The eBay folks are tough competitors and unlike the RedLaser purchase where eBay decided not to hire the team – the Milo.com deal includes a very sharp group of co-founders. Congratulations to Jack Abraham and Aydin Senkut – you guys deserve a big round of applause.
What does this mean for ShopSavvy? It means we are going to continue to work hard to a) make our app more engaging for users and b) make sure we have the best set of local inventory and price data possible. We are still very hungry.
Since the links disappeared when we revamped our site I thought I would repost these links. If you are interested in getting ShopSavvy on another platform let us know and we will let you know when the beta and 1.0 versions are ready:
Okay, so this morning before church I stopped by Target to do some early grocery shopping. I made a point to ‘eat the dog food’ by scanning everything I was thinking about buying AND lots of stuff I had no intention of buying. I began by adding prices for a bunch of the ‘first scan’ products we see a lot (Pepsi, Coke, Dr. Pepper, Vitamin Water, Gatorade and lots of water). We had most of the ‘first scan’ items (I think I had to fix the pictures in two of them) but we didn’t have prices from Target. I added those. Next I scanned paper towels and toilet paper – lots of other folks have added prices from other stores like Tom Thumb, Walmart, Walgreens and CVS – the Target price was better. I added it and bought the paper products. Notice in the screen shot of the app to the right. For the first time we have more local stores (21) that carry a grocery item than online (4). Even more interesting the local prices are better than the online prices – Wow!
Lots of local retailers (typically Mom & Pops) want to get their products and prices into ShopSavvy, but they don’t have the budget or expertise needed to provide us with an API (an electronic feed of their products). With the release of ShopSavvy 4 on the iPhone, any retailer with an iPhone can scan in their products and prices directly into our system by taking advantage of our Authorized Retailer™ program.
We are pretty excited here at the ShopSavvy offices that