Connectivity: Bringing Shopping Worlds Together
Always a step behind our European and Asian counterparts, the US finally has a way to check prices on the Internet by using barcodes on physical products. Using SCANBUY Shopper, customers with certain phones (7 manufacturers including Nokia, Motorola and Samsung are currently supported) can enter the barcode number of a product while in a store and view prices and reviews from the Internet. I’ll let them explain it:
The implications of this service are fairly heavy. Brick-and-Mortar stores will now be competing against their online equivalents more directly than ever before. SCANBUY touts the service as a review tool on its site:
Browsing a media store? Not sure which DVD to buy?Enter its barcode value and get reviews right on your phone.
However, seeing that the same DVD costs 7 dollars less on Amazon may cause customers to put down their copy of The Notebook (why that’s their example of a DVD, I don’t know) and order it when they get back home.
While this is a great step forward for American eCommerce, other countries did not stop innovating and have integrated camera phones into the same service. Shotcode requires its own unique barcode, but is a fascinating way of merging the real world with the Internet. SCANBUY is working on/has this technology, it’s not clear from the site whether it’s real or is still an idea, but as mobile shopping becomes a reality these services will be essential to ecommerce.
Thanks to Lifehacker for the info.
Posted by Chris | June 30, 2006
Ben July 5th, 2006
You also have to factor in the convenience factor. I know when I’m in a store and I go to buy something like a DVD I’m sure i can get it for less online, but here i can simply take it right there. I can see this having some serious implications for bigger ticket items though like computers, digital cameras, etc.
Ishan July 12th, 2006
If one looks at scanbuy.com … among the products they also list SCANBUY Media which takes you to their product called scanLIFE which uses a unique barcode but does more than what Shotcodes offers. The decoder SDK, pointed to by the author, is only for conventional barcodes, QR codes , datamatrix etc.
Chris July 12th, 2006
Thanks Ishan, I had missed scanLIFE. I am still skeptical if Shotcodes and EZcodes, scanLIFE’s version, will be accepted by advertisers and store owners. We’ll have to watch and see as this is an interesting and fastly growing area that will continue to bridge the gap between the online and offline worlds.