Shop Online Before Waiting On Line

Just add it to the list of things “phones” can do nowadays: A personal shopping assistant. (Yes ladies, I said your own personal shopper.) For example, Google’s new phone has an application called shop savvy, where the cell phone owner uses the phone’s camera as a UPC bar code scanner. The phone and application can identify the product within seconds.

Then, it can go online and quickly scan through numerous online stores that sell the same product. It can display what the same item is selling for online and in other stores, too. The providers say that this application could potentially save its owners so much money that the phones could easily pay for themselves.

Man, I wish I thought of this. On second thought, even if I had thought of this, I probably wouldn’t have even thought that it would be possible to do all that the application does. What a great idea.

It is going to be interesting to see what this means for retailers. Say everyone has this application on their phones in the next ten years. Whenever someone buys something, especially anything over twenty dollars, they will be comparing prices to stores all over the world. Theoretically, the actual stores can become simply test drives.

Let’s say that someone wants to buy a TV. They will go down to the local electronics super store, and find one that they really like. Then they’ll scan the UPC symbol and find out the best price possible. Now, what are the odds that the best price in the whole world for that television set will be at that particular store? I would think that they would be very, very low.

It then becomes a question of convenience. Is the price difference enough that it’s worth leaving the store and leaving you investment of the time and money and gas it took you to get there? That’s going to be the deciding factor as to whether or not you buy your TV from the place that you saw it, or go to where the internet says has a better deal.

I’m sure that this new application will not be used for all purchases, say printer paper or fast food cheeseburgers. These purchases are matters of convenience and personal taste. But for bigger purchases that are expensive and where the buyer does not have substantial experience in purchasing a certain kind of item, this application will be extremely valuable.

It is going to be another driver of competition among businesses, because only the very cheapest sellers will do the vast majority of the selling. That’s good for us in the long run, because it will lower the price and prevent illegal price gouging and artificially high prices. I hope that it does not lead to unpleasant business practices, however.

Stores, who are already at a disadvantage because they need to pay for facilities and property taxes when online retailers do not, can start to scrimp on quality of customer service, employee salary and benefits and other things around the store.

It will be interesting to see what this latest technological development will do to businesses.