This last week has been a pretty crazy one here at ShopSavvy. We’ve seen traffic explode and, with that traffic, we’ve gathered a lot of insight about how the 2011 shopping season is shaping up.

A hint: this weekend was a promising beginning.

So we’ve collected statistics about Black Friday 2011 and put it into infographic form.

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.

Here at ShopSavvy, we are proud to announce of our latest Windows Phone release, which we’re calling ShopSavvy Mango.

Download ShopSavvy Mango

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 Mango Hub from Matthias Shapiro on Vimeo.

We’ve incorporated all the best elements of Windows Phone Metro design language into our app to give the best possible experience.

That’s a summary of ShopSavvy Mango. We hope that you’ll download it, use it and enjoy it.

Download ShopSavvy Mango