When google thinks local, they think ShopSavvy!

If you are like me you use Google Alerts to alert yourself when someone mentions your brand. Each day I get LOTS of alerts for the term ShopSavvy – today was no different. One alert pointed me to a post on Google’s Retail Advertising Blog along with this sentence, “we at Google recognize the need to build better products to connect retailers with shop-savvy, local customers.”

I showed the post to our team and one of our developers was sort of pissed that Google was using our trademark when talking about local/mobile shopping. (Exactly one year ago we were granted a trademark for the term ‘ShopSavvy®’, registration number 77571663). It took me about a second to realize that even people at Google either consciously or subconsciously think about ShopSavvy when they think about mobile-powered local shopping. At the end of the day that is what ShopSavvy is all about. Who sells the products I want to buy, who has them in stock and for how much – oh and how do I get there. So I am super pumped ShopSavvy has found its way into the ether in Google’s retail team.

I don’t think Julia Tang had any ill intent when she used our trademark in her post, but we have seen a number of instances where someone will write a blog post suggesting ‘consumers can shopsavvy with [insert competitor name]‘ or use shopsavvy in their keywords in the iTunes store. We appreciate the former, but not the latter use.

Do you have prices for Beer? Wine? Spirts?

You would be surprised by the number of barcode scans use app scanner iphone, we see for beer, wine and spirits. Thousands per day, but sadly we have VERY few prices (local or online) for alcohol. Are you a retailer who carries alcohol? Want exposure to millions of American shoppers who drink? Give us an API to your pricing and we will send our potentially intoxicated users to you.

Update: More than a few (maybe 10) online spirits retailers contacted me about including their products in ShopSavvy. Thanks! But we still need local retailers in the system. If you know of a local retailer suggest to them that they should be in ShopSavvy…

Barcode Scanning Update

Black Friday was HUGE for ShopSavvy. The numbers were off the charts (Americans were shopping in droves). Our paid competitor, RedLaser, is no longer offering Amazon prices – now exclusively using TheFind (local results) and their users are taking note. ShopSavvy offers pricing from more than 20,000 retailers (local and online). Once our barcode scanning improvements are implemented I am very hopeful that users will begin to realize that the REAL power of ShopSavvy is the data. Our team has four years of development in our local and online search platform (called PriceNark) and it is the real genius behind ShopSavvy. We have more retailers and more products than any mobile price comparison application on the market (and most normal price comparison services) – and ShopSavvy is 100% FREE.

Take a look at the version 1.2 scanning update to the right. We show progress of the scan as well as offer a boundary to show users were to align the scanner. We hope this will help users a) who are unsure if ShopSavvy is scanning by showing progress and b) to know where to align the barcode. Our testing (with my wife who couldn’t really use version 1.0) shows that most users can scan pretty easily with these two additions. These fixes are in addition to the fork of our scanning library (i.e. one for 2/3G and one for 3GS).