Mobile Apps Exploding this Holiday Season
By Geoffery A. Fowler and Yukari Iwatani Kane for the Wall Street Journal
A new generation of mobile-phone software is helping consumers shop smarter this holiday season.
Browsing at a Best Buy Co. store last week, 33-year-old Erik Olson picked up a Blu-ray version of the movie “Heat” and used the camera on his Motorola Inc. Droid smart phone to scan the DVD’s bar-code label. Using an application called ShopSavvy, his phone checked prices for the movie at other stores. Best Buy wanted $26, but the phone told him Walmart.com was charging $19.
“I ended up just buying it from Walmart.com,” says Mr. Olson, of El Cerrito, Calif. “If I see something at a store that catches my eye but the price seems kind of high, I’ll double check the price.”
Many shoppers are accustomed to using the Internet to research products and prices before they hit the mall. But now, mobile-shopping apps take that research on the road. Apps such as Big In Japan Inc.’s ShopSavvy and TheFind Inc.’s Where to Shop identify stores in the immediate vicinity that have a product you’re looking for, and then tell you which product is cheapest and closest. The apps, which are downloaded through the wireless connections on iPhones and other smart phones, ask users to share basic information such as their location and what they’re looking to buy. Some automate that process by collecting location data from built-in GPS sensors and cameras that can scan bar codes on products.
The technology is new and still has its kinks, such as sending shoppers to stores where the products are out of stock. Pricing information is obtained from retailers’ Web sites or by tapping into their databases, but may be flawed if retailers change prices at the last minute, for example. And sometimes, flaky mobile-data networks that can render apps slow or useless.
Nonetheless, this is shaping up to be the first app-powered Christmas. Compared with last year, there was a 77% increase in downloads of shopping and shopping-tool apps for Apple Inc.’s iPhone on Black Friday, according to ad-exchange company Mobclix Inc., which tracks such usage. ShopSavvy said its app for the iPhone and Google Inc.’s Android operating system was used 18 million times over the long Thanksgiving weekend, compared with about one million times on a regular day.
“The distinction between shopping online and in store is disappearing,” says Siva Kumar, chief executive of TheFind, which collects more than 400 million product listings from Web sites and stores. “Today’s reality is that you have to match prices, or else somebody will walk out of your store,” he says.
For many shoppers, the apps reinforce whether they’re getting a good deal, especially since prices quoted are updated by the mobile service. Indeed, the movie Mr. Olson bought for $19 is now selling for $14.99 at BestBuy.com and $16.32 at Walmart.com. It’s prices differences like these that shoppers can leverage with a store manager to get a better price.
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