Image via CrunchBase

The recent move by Amazon to offer $5 for retail shoppers to buy online felt like kicking a man twice when he was already down to a lot of retailers.  Many merchants were already concerned about being used as a glorified showroom for Amazon’s Jeff Bezos before this recent move with speculation that many were missing their numbers because of Amazons mobile price check application.

Here at ShopSavvy we love local merchants.   Our users want to know what all their options are both online and local presented in a neutral and unbiased way— not just merchants in Amazon’s marketplace.  They want this presented without favoritism so they can make good buying decisions about product selection and where to buy.  Buying from Amazon is great and for many habitual, but did you know in our system they are the lowest priced choice only 7% of the time? If you buy from Amazon, you are not always getting the best deal and they certainly don’t work to get you local options.

Even when the price is lower online, our users often want to see what their local options are, either for immediate gratification or because they love the relationship they have with their local retailer.  In the long run we believe a balanced ecosystem of strong local retail with efficient online options is healthiest and this is what we strive for.

So while local stores have had a really brutal few years, this is going to change in the next few years as they get new opportunities to fight back.  In fact, we think current shopping experience for local retail is going to be transformed significantly in the next 3-5 years.   The mini computers people are carrying in their hands now are just using things like reviews, purchasing and price comparison as an early beachhead.  In a few years the way you shop locally will be completely different.

Why? Whole new conversations will be starting between brands, retailers and shoppers will transform retail and the shopping experience making it more connected (with friends/family), informed and enjoyable.  This will dramatically improve the local shopping experience and give local merchants new ways to offer value relative to online options that may not be readily apparent now.

Consumers are open to new sorts of conversations with retailers that are not happening now.  For example, currently most conversations between retailers and consumers now are what I call “One to Many”.  If you offer a sale, it’s often to large groups of people and there is very little segmentation or targeting.   With these new technologies based on loyalty data, buying patterns, and strategies such as competitive couponing, consumers will start to have one to one conversations with retailers.

The last decade or so has not been a great one for local retailers, but  the tide is changing with advances in technology.  Ironically, the technology that is causing pain for local retailers now, will offer new opportunities in the future.  For the those retailers that embrace this change, and get ahead of the curve, we believe it’s a competitive opportunity to recapture some lost ground and create a better shopping experience for shoppers.  This takes courage not to stick your head in the sand while Amazon steals your lunch.

To that end, if you are a local retailer that is looking to find ways to start new conversations with consumers in your stores—reach out to us –we’re listening and open to new ideas to help local merchants.  Amazon doesn’t have the last word here, this is just the beginning of what technology can bring to local.

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:

http://data.shopsavvy.com/products/24543656067/suggestedused

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

I asked the guys to give me an understanding of how many API calls PriceNark (our inventory and price system for ShopSavvy) is handling per day and per month. While we aren’t in the API Billionaires Club, we aren’t doing that shabby. PriceNark currently handles more than 3.3 million API calls per day or just over 100 million API calls per month. These calls are just for ShopSavvy. Earlier this month we opened up our API to third parties in an open beta. Later this summer we will start releasing data around the number API calls we deliver outside to third parties like CNET. My biggest question? How much is an API call worth?

They are all working together to make ShopSavvy better. More than half a million people generate content for ShopSavvy – adding pictures, retailers and prices to our system. Want to join in on the fun? Just scan a product and then click on ‘Options’ in the upper right hand corner of the app. You can edit the name and image or add a local price (only add prices when you are in the actual retailer).

I am please to announce that our API connections to Intuit’s Quickbooks Point of Sale software are ready for small retailers who are willing to beta test. If you have one or two stores AND use Quickbooks POS we have some software that will allow you to share your prices and inventory with millions of savvy shoppers who use ShopSavvy. If you like we can also expose your data through our public API further distributing your data, bringing it closer to the consumers who will frequent your store. Interested? Send an email to sales@shopsavvy.mobi and indicate which version of Quickbooks POS you have, how many locations, whether or not you use UPC/EANs and how many products you carry.

One our beta period is over we will officially release our adapter to ANY QuickBooks POS retailer allowing for seemless integration of their inventory and pricing information into our system.

I spend time reading comments from users (market, twitter, facebook and other) and it seems like there remains confusion over our local inventory data. I wanted to set the record straight in this post. We have local price and inventory data from more than 26,000 retailers, but users are sometimes confused about when they should get in their car and when they should dial their phone.

Let me set the scene for you: Lets say you have a terrible cold and the last Kleenex ran out last night. Your mom isn’t willing to head to the store to get you some more and you realize your nose is going to fall off if you blow it with the paper towels one more time. So you pull out ShopSavvy and scan the barcode on the empty Kleenex box. Here is what you see:

There are 8 online sources and 19 local stores that we have in our system. Note the blue dot next to the lowest local store price. Note that the local price is actually less than the lowest online price (happens more often than you might think). The ‘blue dot’ signifies confirmed local inventory. When you see a blue dot next to a price we have information from the retailer that the item is in stock.

Now click on the Local Store tab and here is what you see:

Obviously most grocery stores carry Kleenex, but only Walmart, Target and Dollar General share there prices and inventory with ShopSavvy. Note the ‘Add Store’ row – you can tap it anytime and add a price from the store you are standing in (assuming we don’t have it). Remember, don’t add prices from you house (we check location to ensure you are in the store). Note how we carry the blue dot to this screen indicating which retailer confirms inventory. Now you can assume that the closest grocery store to you will have Kleenex, but imagine instead you are looking for the latest video game at Christmas. Instead of calling all over town you can use ShopSavvy to figure out who has the item. Now that we see Target has the item we don’t know which of the ten stores has it so you need to tap on the Target tab:

By default we send you to the closest store (whether or not they have the item in stock). In this example, the closest store has the item in stock. You can always click on the address to select a different store as seen below:

In this case, all of the Target stores have Kleenx in stock (as you would have assumed). Now lets say you were in Walmart and wanted to know if they would match the price you saw at Target. Just click on the ‘Price Matching Policy’ tab to find out if a particular retailer will match prices (lots of times you don’t need to drive, the retailer you are in will match). Here is an example:

At the end of the day we provide the phone number of each retail store – before you drive, just call the store to check to ensure they have a product (blue dot or not).

ShopSavvy contains prices and inventory from more than 26,000 local retailers with more than a million locations at last count from American Eagle to Zyada. Some retailers offer us APIs, while others regularly upload files to our FTP site. If you are a retailer and want us to include your products in ShopSavvy the process is fairly simple:

- Step 1: Execute our Standard Retailer Contract
- Step 2: Fill out our Retailer Data Form
- Step 3: Send us your API, your data, or read our data feed specification HERE

Retailers can also use the ShopSavvy client application (on Android or iOS) to change prices on the fly by enrolling in our ShopSavvy Authorized Retailer Program. The retailer simply notifies us that they are authorized by the retailer in question to modify prices and we will make their ShopSavvy install ‘authoritative’. Any time the retailer’s agent or representative scans a product and edits the price the updated price will be immediately available. Sign up here.

Our users are also adding retailers, prices and inventory. Just click on the ‘Options’ tab in iOS or ‘Edit’ button on Android and you can edit the picture, title – add a retailer (make sure you are in the store or it won’t work) and the price you see. We use a user karma score + age of price to determine how many other users see your work. Keep adding prices and your score will go up as we begin to be able to trust your contributions. Soon you will be able to see your progress in the app.

When Matt Weathers joined the team he wanted to know how well we were performing in various areas. He has hired a number of third party firms to research how consumers use ShopSavvy, how they use competitive apps and how well we perform on local inventory and price search. The data coming in has resulted in big changes in the app itself. For example, we simplified the UI when we the research revealed users were completely confused by the old UI.

The local research part of the study was conducted by a former Deloitte Consultant and is about 50% complete. Our plan is to release the results in a white paper, but I thought I would share some of the early numbers coming out of the research. We think we are doing really well revealing local inventory and pricing information to consumers and the research is bearing that out (hell, we’ve be doing this full-time for three years). In the graphs below you will see we focused on the number of retailers we returned during the study as well as the price returned

More than 7.5 million smartphone owners use ShopSavvy to scan barcodes when they shop. With each scan our users ‘check-in’ at a retail location giving us valuable location data so that we can deliver them relevant deals to help them save money. Some of our users are adding product data including product pictures (more than 2 pictures a minute) and product pricing (more than 10 additions a minute). Each month our users scan millions of barcodes requiring us to deliver a LOT of information (product info, product reviews, local prices/inventory and online prices) back to them – billions of pieces of data in the course of a month. During the course of the year it takes about 20 servers (not including development servers) to keep everything running.

- 3 PriceNark 4 API servers
- 2 PriceNark 3.2 servers
- 1 Image server
- 1 Rails box (running AdOns and misc API endpoints)
- 1 Tomcat box (running misc backend API endpoints)
- 1 Database (MySQL) server
- 1 Database (MySQL read replica) server
- 3 Chalupa servers (barcode decoding)
- 6 Cluster servers (Hadoop/Cassandra/HDFS)
- 1 WordPress (shopsavvy.mobi)

During new releases or during special deals we sometimes need to spin up new instances of PriceNark and Chalupa. During Christmas we double all of these server counts to deal with the increased shopping traffic. We also leverage Amazon’s cloud for redundancy – we can run completely in the EC2 cloud or on our own servers.

PriceNark IV is the back end of ShopSavvy. It uses proprietary product search algorithms to deliver industry leading shopping results. The platform supports 33+ million product API calls per month and is housed in our data center in Dallas and in the cloud at Amazon. PriceNark makes those 33M calls to more than 40,000 retailers for more than 10,000,000 products. The technology was developed using .NET and leverages MySQL and Hadoop MapReduce to handle the more than 100+ million product attributes including price and inventory.

Using a proprietary ‘product karma’ system to deliver high quality results our system (according to one investment banking study) delivered 74 online and local results on average versus our largest competitor at 42. PriceNark V due in Q2 will expand product search sources for up to 10X better retailer coverage, product coverage, attributes and offers.