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

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.

You can download ShopSavvy in Windows Phone Marketplace at http://bit.ly/shopsavvymango.

Read today’s press release here. Matthias will be posting an in-depth look at the ShopSavvy update in additional blog posts.

ShopSavvy is ranked NO. 1 in the Tools category and between NO. 20 and NO. 30 overall in the Windows Phone 7 market. Since December ShopSavvy has been downloaded 105,878 times. We estimate about 10% of Windows Phone 7 users have ShopSavvy on their phones compared with 13% of ALL smartphone users (we are on a much higher percentage of iOS and Android devices). Here is a graph:

Apple and Google just updated their ranking systems in their respective app stores and based on what we are seeing they both decided to punish apps that ‘game’ the system. Now the stores seem to check to see how often your app is downloaded AND how often it is used by those who download the app. So if you are paying folks to download your app you will get punished HARD. As a result ShopSavvy’s rank in every market has improved and our daily downloads have almost doubled. Here is a run down:

- #6 in Apple App Store (Utilities)
- #5 in Android Market (Shopping)
- #3 in Amazon’s Android Market (Shopping)
- #1 in Windows Phone 7 (Tools)

UPDATE: GigaOm is reporting that Apple is now rejecting apps that use Pay-per-install campaigns.

Ever wonder what it takes to rank in the top No. 25 Overall or No. 1 in the Tools category in the Windows Phone 7 App Market? ShopSavvy is currently No. 1 in Tools and No. 22 Overall (we have been as high as 14 overall). We are even beating Google! Here are the particulars:

- 800 downloads per day on average (top day was 3,172)
- 72,881 cumulative downloads

The WP7 version of the app is handicapped by Microsoft’s camera policies, but we have high hopes they will open up the camera to developers soon. Here is a screenshot showing our downloads:

I finally got around to tweeting that we had hit the 200,000 downloads per week mark when Jake showed me the Flurry data. Turns out we are doing more than 287,000 downloads per week now! Wow. The downloads are combined from iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7 (they do not include Nokia as we aren’t tracking downloads there right now).

Matthias Shapiro, the developer who gave birth to our Windows Phone 7 version of ShopSavvy, has just ‘released’ homo sapien shaprio 1.0. Congrats Matthias!

The guys over at the Windows Phone Dev Podcast selected ShopSavvy as their app of the week. Hosted by Ryan and Travis Lowdermilk, the Windows Phone Dev Podcast is the first online show, exclusively, about Windows Phone development. This show is produced by developers for developers. Each week, Ryan and Travis Lowdermilk traverse the exciting world of the Windows Phone development platform.  They’ll discuss news and latest developments, all the while, putting it in the perspective of what it means for developers.

Matthias put together a little video to give you a glimpse of ShopSavvy on Windows Phone 7. Take a look: