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More People are Using Smartphone Applications to Shop and Merchants are Taking Note!

December 23rd, 2010 | Online & Small Business Resources,shopping,Small Business | 1 Comment »

With only 1 shopping day left before Christmas, I hope you have all of your shopping done with by now but if you haven’t you should really go to the stores with your smartphone and a few trusty applications loaded so that you can make the most informed decision possible.

As the Wall Street Journal indicated in this article, only 5.6% of all shoppers on Black Friday used a smartphone to compare prices while in the store but this number represents a 50 fold increase from a year ago. I have actually used a couple different applications while in stores to compare prices and on more than one occasion have actually left the store to purchase the product online because it was considerably cheaper.

Some of the most popular smartphone applications that will allow Shoppers to scan barcodes in the store and instantly show them the cheapest price available online or in a bricks and mortar location are theFind and Google Shopper.  Consumers can download these applications for free and within seconds can search for lowest price for any given product.

Stores are quickly becoming aware that shoppers have this new found ability to instantly compare prices and are trying to adapt in order to take advantage of or at least cope with the results but I don’t think that they are changing quickly enough in my opinion.  I am still waiting for the day when I can show the Best Buy store manager a price I found online on my smartphone and have him or her match that price in their store.  Today they will not even consider doing that unless the store I am comparing their price to also has a bricks and mortar location.  I find this policy to be outdated and ridiculous and hopefully the coming widespread use of comparison shopping using smartphone applications will open these company’s eyes and make them change these archaic policies.

Have you ever tried to get a bricks and mortar store to match a price you found online for the same product?  What were your results?

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One Response

  1. […] numbers show a staggering increase from just 1 year ago when I wrote this KikScore blog post that talked about a Wall Street Journal article that indicated that only 5.6% of […]

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