ShopSavvy is hiring a ‘Startup Manager’. The position is pretty typical for a startup (i.e. your responsibilities will be very varied). The position pays $50K+stock options and will be based either in Dallas or San Francisco (salary is really focused on DFW area candidate). Duties will include:
Social Media Duties
- Craft social media strategy
- craft stories for corporate blog
- craft stories for shopping blogs
- tweet interesting stuff about ShopSavvy and Shopping
- update Facebook presence with interesting stuff about ShopSavvy and Shopping
- build a shopping community
Managerial Duties
- direct and manage PR activity with PR firm
- direct and manage off shore resources (Randy)
- direct and manage freelance writers for shopping stories
Personal Assistant to CEO Duties
- schedule all calls and appointments for CEO
- organize travel schedule for employees (mainly CEO)
- coordinate with controller and CPA for all HR and expense issues
My entry in the pumpkin carving contest here at the office – a barcode on a pumpkin. I should have added more lines, but I was too busy cheering for the Rangers.
Here at ShopSavvy our backend systems see a LOT of prices each day – millions in fact. That data is pretty useful. For example, have you ever wondered how much you should sell a particular used product for if you really want it to sell fast? We have a simple endpoint that can give you this price:
Just insert the UPC/EAN after the /products/ in the URL and our system will return a price 20% lower than the lowest used price other sellers are offering. The system isn’t perfect as we only have a few million products with ‘suggested used’ prices out of more than twenty million total – but it is pretty good. Also, some sellers sell books for a penny (i.e. they make money on the shipping arbitrage) so 20% less than a penny is like .008 cents.
We have LOTS of endpoints like this for all sorts of bits of data. Have any cool ideas? Email us and we might be able to help – sales@shopsavvy.com
What people don’t understand about ShopSavvy is that scanning barcodes is only a small part of what we do. Telling someone that this:
is actually the numbers 9781449379865 is easy enough to do, but is of limited utility.
What is really valuable is being able to have your phone tell you:
Hey, that thing you’re holding in your hand can be purchased for $27 online or $44 at a store right down the street.
So we set up a little experiment where we took a variety of products, from Blu-Rays to books to puzzles and games to grocery items and scanned them with Bing Vision and with ShopSavvy.
We were looking for the following things:
Does scanning this item give me a product page for the exact item I’m holding right now? – sending us to a search page for that item isn’t good enough, we want to see a page for the actual product.
Do I get a picture for the item? – for Bing, we want this picture in our list of options so we know what we’re tapping on.
Do I get prices for this item? – knowing what the item is isn’t good enough. We already know what the item is… we’re holding it! We want to do a price comparison. “Am I paying too much for this?” is the most important question.
If we can get all three of these questions to answer “yes”, then the app passes for that product.
You can see the results below in a chart.
Honestly, I was surprised the results were quite so stark. Although Rylan, who maintains our product and prices information, was not. He’s been working on this problem long enough to know that there is more to a good barcode scanner than meets the eye.
The Windows Phone Mango update is a major update and we at ShopSavvy have made the most of it with the following features:
Live Scanning
We know everyone has been waiting for this and we’re delighted to say that users no longer need to exit the app to scan barcodes, but can do live scans within the app. We can also pin the scanner to our front page so we can get to it with a single tap.
As we were integrating live scanning into the app, we decided to make this scan page a single source for finding things. To that end, a simple swipe takes us to a QR Code scanner.
Another swipe takes us to a search screen so we can do a simple keyword search and find products that way.
Products
Improvements to how users can view products seem small, but they add up to a a powerful experience. First is my personal favorite feature: Product pins. Using the pin button in the app bar, we can take a product that we like and pin it directly to the front screen of the app. Now when we tap on it, we go directly to that product page to see prices. I’ve been using this feature to create an ad hoc home page shopping list.
We’ve also added (seen in the screenshots below)
a review summary to give a good feel for how the overall reviews pan out
a visual indicator inside each item to show how close to the cheapest price the current prices is
the ability to get directions to the store using Bing Maps
share the deal using the built-in social networks on your Windows Phone (including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn)
ShopSavvy Hub
The ShopSavvy Hub now includes nearby scans and hundreds of deals exclusively from retailers near you. The change to scanning and the new features required a new redesign. I could explain it, but it really must be seen in action.
ShopSavvy today announced a new, feature-rich release of ShopSavvy for Windows Phone, designed to fully leverage the enhancements in the Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” update.
ShopSavvy, the top shopping app on the iPhone and Android platforms with more than 20 million downloads, was initially released for Windows Phone in December 2010 and has been one of the most popular apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace ever since.
According to ShopSavvy’s lead developer for Windows Phone, Matthias Shapiro, “The new release of ShopSavvy fully exploits the Metro UI and the improvements in Mango to create a fluid, enjoyable and efficient experience for users. We expect mobile users who embrace Windows Phone 7.5 to have a lot of fun shopping with ShopSavvy in hand.”
New features in ShopSavvy for Windows Phone include:
Faster scanning of UPC and QR Codes (now live in-app);
Hundreds of deals from retailers including Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy and more;
Integration with Bing Vision, enabling users to scan a product with Bing and get results from ShopSavvy’s unmatched database of 20 million products and tens of thousands of retailers;
New social features such as the ability to see nearby scans by ShopSavvy users close to you;
Users can turn their home page into a shopping list by pinning their favorite products to the home screen to instantly see the lowest prices.
Millions of ShopSavvy users have, at one time or another, updated the photo of a product. When we added the ability for users to edit product images, titles, retailers and prices we were surprised how many users added ‘action shots’ of products. What is the difference between a user generated product image and an action shot? The original intent was for users to add photos of products that didn’t have an image or those with low quality images. Action shots often include the user holding the product or perhaps the user’s dog holding the product. There are SOOOOO many great pictures that users have uploaded we decided it would be fun to let you see them in the app. Beginning in our latest Android release (i.e. it is not in our current iOS release) in the lower right corner of the product preview page (i.e. the one with the product picture) you will see a ‘Photos’ icon. You can click here to see and vote on action shots submitted by other users. You can also add your own action shots. You can still ‘edit’ the photo in the options menu, but now you have a quick an easy way to add fun action shots. Since we have more than 20,000,000 user photos in our system we can’t comb through them all and determine which are user gen and which are action shots – instead we are starting fresh so you won’t see many action shots to start with. Check out some example ‘action shots’ our users have uploaded for Toy Story 3.
If you are going to be at the App Conference and Hackathon October 26-27 in Santa Clara you really need to check our panel: NFC (near field communications): How is it going to change mobile (Oct 27, 11AM, Room 4, Track 1 – Platform Wars). Matt Weathers (our VP of Product), Edwin Aoki (Architect from PayPal), Dan Preston (CTO at AisleBuyer) will serve on the panel which is moderated by Wade Roush the San Francisco Editor of Xconomy.
Here is the overview: “PayPal has announced mobile plans that include newly acquired assets like Milo.com, Where Inc, and Zong. In May Google announced Google Wallet, its new mobile-payment system based on near field communications. And RIM released its BlackBerry Java SDK v7.0 into beta, which, among other things, allows mobile developers to build NFC applications for the BlackBerry 7 OS. In other words, people can now use cell phones to shop and buy. In the future individual products on store shelves will have tiny NFC enabled labels with product information, advertising, coupons or offers. Come learn about the new trends and technologies, what it means, and how to develop with it in mind.”
