Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
ShopSavvy has been featured on more than 250 TV newscasts so far this week, a testament to the emergence of barcode scanning as the No. 1 holiday shopping trend. Here’s a news release we put out this morning with some interesting usage statistics leading into Black Friday:
Dallas, Texas – From Nov. 17-23, ShopSavvy users performed 15 million barcode scans with the No. 1 holiday shopping app, with Walmart the most popular destination among users. Since the holiday shopping season began Nov. 1, ShopSavvy users have performed more than 45 million scans. The company expects a total of 120 million scans in November, with 60 million of those coming over Black Friday weekend.
Data from ShopSavvy’s 6.5 million users also showed that the average user scanned items at four different retailers during the time period, scanned an average of eight items per store, and spent an average of three hours shopping with scanner in hand. So far during November, ShopSavvy users have performed more than three times the number of scans conducted in the same period in 2009. They are also spending more than twice as much time shopping with ShopSavvy and visiting more retailers with ShopSavvy in hand.
“The adoption of barcode scanning as a shopping aid is one of the biggest holiday shopping stories of 2010,” said Alexander Muse, co-founder of ShopSavvy. “We are also seeing users take advantage of the new ’social shopping’ features in ShopSavvy 4, including uploading products and prices to our database, and sharing deals and discoveries with the user community. It’s changing the way people approach their holiday shopping.”
Muse added: “In a typical month, ShopSavvy users conduct between 30 and 50 million scans; this month, we are on track for 120 million scans, with half of those over Black Friday weekend. This represents a mountain of data of value to retailers, advertisers and the shopping public.”
Based on ShopSavvy user data, the most-scanned products in the top holiday gift categories from Nov. 17-23 were the following:
Toys
1. LeapFrog Leapster Explorer Learning Experience
2. DIego Plush Backpack Animal Rescuer
3. FurReal Friends Go Go
4. Fushigi Magic Gravity Ball
5. Imaginext Bigfoot The Monster
DVDs
1. “Avatar”
2. “Toy Story 3″
3. “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”
4. “Disney’s A Christmas Carol”
5. “The Last Airbender”
Video Games
1. “Call of Duty: Black Ops”
2. “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″
3. “Call of Duty: Black Ops Hardened Edition”
4. “Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit”
5. “uDraw Studio”
Consumer Electronics
1. Canon PowerShot 7.1 Megapixel Digital ELPH Camera
2. Apple iPhone 4 Black
3. Apple iPad Wi-Fi
4. Dyson DC25 All Floors Ball Vacuum
5. Apple iPod touch
Based on ShopSavvy user data, shoppers conducted the most scans at the following U.S. retailers from Nov. 17-23:
1. Walmart
2. Best Buy
3. Costco
4. Sam’s Club
5. Target
ShopSavvy users are expected to conduct more than 200 million scans in November and December, Muse said.
Earlier this month, ShopSavvy released ShopSavvy 4 for iPhone, offering an array of new features to make holiday shopping easier for smartphone users. The new consumer-friendly functionality includes:
* Price-matching policies. ShopSavvy tells you whether a retailer will match a competitor’s lower price based ShopSavvy results.
* Up-to-date inventory information. A blue dot by a retailer’s name on the price results pages tells you whether an item is currently in stock.
* Streaming deals. ShopSavvy offers a Twitter-like stream of special deals and short-term promotions aggregated from sources across the Web, as well as exclusive deals for ShopSavvy users.
* Add and share product photos and prices. When users find a product, price or retailer that’s not already in ShopSavvy’s price comparison engine, they can instantly add it – taking the product’s photo and adding the price, store name, and other descriptive information. ShopSavvy 4 filters user submissions to optimize accuracy.
* Add and share product ratings and reviews. In previous versions of ShopSavvy, users could scan books, DVDs, consumer electronics and other products to call up third-party online reviews. In ShopSavvy 4, users can add their own ratings and reviews – and share them with the universe of ShopSavvy users.
ShopSavvy, developed by Dallas-based Big in Japan, is a personal shopping companion for smartphone users. The application enables consumers to scan the UPC, EAN or QR barcodes of products they want to buy and do immediate, in-store price comparisons with local and online retailers. ShopSavvy has emerged as one of the most celebrated and widely embraced shopping apps for Android, the iPhone, and Nokia smartphones, with more than 6.5 million ShopSavvy users performing 50 million scans monthly. ShopSavvy’s price comparison engine includes up-to-date pricing and inventory information from more than 20,000 retailers worldwide, covering more than 20 million products.
