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.