Checkout Smartshop and other similar mobile price comparison software might soon be on the list of most-hated technologies of brick-and-mortar retailers. Price comparison for shoppers has become a lot easier through different online services yet most traditional brick-and-mortar retailers avoid these platforms since they cannot match the competitive prices on the Internet due to different, higher costs in their their retail stores.

Luckily for these retailers their customers so far had no chance to check prices for the products offered immediately in the store. Customers interested in price comparisons had to do it manually after their visit to the retailer at their PC at home.

Along came the iPhone (as well as other mobile phones) and an application call Checkout Smartshop that allows instant price comparison and online order or products that you just see standing in front of you in whatever retail store you are.

Checkout Smart Shop is an easy way to find prices (local and online), reviews, and local information for a product. Here is how it works:

1. Enter a barcode (UPC) number (faster than typing in a product description on the web!)
2. Now you’re searching!  Checkout automatically starts by bringing you to product reviews so you can see what other people liked about the product you’re looking at.  Checkout also automatically filters out the less useful reviews so you see things other people thought were good to know (don’t worry, the rest of the reviews are just a click away if you want to see them).  By default you see review summaries so you can tell at a glance what people thought, but full reviews are also just a touch away.  Note that even after you come to the reviews screen Checkout will continue to look for and load reviews.



3. If you want to look beyond reviews, you can look at either local or online prices.  For either category you can see the price listed, and choose to visit the web site if you like.

The challenge is that this is another building block to bring online experiences into traditional offline environments through the use of mobile computing. Retailers will be confronted with a lot of questions.

What are the consequences for shoppers? How will it change impulse shopping behavior? Does the knowledge of other prices redirect impulse shopping behavior from the location where it was triggered (the brick-and-mortar store) to the online store?

Do we see a new generation of shoppers that see brick-and-mortar shops only as an outlet to experience the product but the purchase is made online right in the store where the cheapest offer can be found?

What does this mean for retailers? Should retailers fight these mobile applications and try to focus on keeping the existing business model?

Or should the focus shift towards creating a truly extraordinary shopping experience, redesigning the supply chain and through this ensuring maybe not the cheapest, but probably competitive prices.

Posted in mobile, retail | Permalink | 2 Comments »

Recently I have been traveling quite a lot, mostly to locations where I haven’t been before. Since I use a BlackBerry Curve with GPS and Google Maps Mobile (GMM) as my main mobile phone, I thought that my mobile companion can definitely help me answer a lot of questions while on the road. I was wrong.

Let’s recap a few situations:

I was in the city center of Brussels and wondering where I could find something to eat. Unfortunately most of the shops were already closed and I didn’t want to go to a restaurant. So I started Google Maps, searched for “McDonalds” and “Subways” and basically the results where mediocre: I found out where the McDonalds Headquarter is in Belgium (some 20 km outside Brussels), I guess there might be a Subway’s restaurant but it was out of walking distance and I was not willing to study public transportation - so at the end I asked around for the next train station and found a small shop there.

Similar situations happened in Milan and Istanbul - even in Palo Alto, the heart of Silicon Valley, I was trying to use Google Maps Mobile to help me find a dedicated Puma Store. When I finally arrived at the mall it was merely a little Puma shop with a few of the most common shoes - not exactly what I have been looking for (I was looking for the Puma Black Label series of shoes….but that’s a different story).

Overall my impression was that there is a huge potential for Google Maps Mobile and location based services when you are traveling or in locations that you don’t know that well. The only problem: Google Maps Mobile is simply not ready for primetime yet.

I have summarized the areas for improvement in the list and I am the first to upgrade when Google implements a few of these requests:

1. Include a pedestrian mode
   Not everyone is using GPS in a car - I guess that most users of Google Maps Mobile use it for navigation outside their car when they are walking or cycling. If you need GPS navigation regularly in a car I suppose most people would buy a dedicated GPS car navigation system. I want to have the ability to switch to a “pedestrian mode” where the routing is based on each “walkable” street, not just on “drivable” streets as in a car mode. Help me find the shortest way in a city, and not the way next to the main roads.
2. Include support for the most common human activities
   We humans tend to follow the same patterns and we usually perform quite similar activities to reach certain outcomes. There are different situations when we are looking for restaurants, a small shop, a big supermarket, a fast food restaurant, a coffee shop or a toilet. I could imagine a menu with options that resemble common activities and include Eat, Drink, Sleep, Shop, See/Discover. The submenu for Eat would be “Fast Food”, “Average Restaurant”, “Exclusive Restaurant” - and Google Maps provides suggestions based on my current location.
3. A location based search for actual products and services
   When I was in Milan, I was not searching for a restaurant itself, I was searching for typical, traditional Italian pasta; same in California, I was looking for a shop that sells the Puma Black Label series of shoes and wouldn’t mind if I can find them in a store that is not a Puma store. So besides supporting certain activities that most humans perform regularly, location based search should also help me find the location of certain products - whether it is helping me find a certain pair of shoes or a restaurant that sells a certain kind of pasta. While the quality of the search results depends largely on the amount of data that is integrated, the first step might be to integrate Google Product Search into Google Maps.
4. Turn Google Maps Mobile into a travel companion
   Since the biggest use of Google Maps Mobile can be expected from people who are traveling (business and personal) Google Maps Mobile should be able to store all the relevant information for my trip (hotels, meeting points, maybe even appointment schedules - combined with Google Calendar) and be my travel companion that has all information available for me. I prepare it in advance (maybe by mailing it to a dedicated email address) and when I am on the road, I just push next, next, next.
5. Solve the language problem
   When I was in Brussels, I tried to search for the Flemish Parliament, the venue for a workshop that I planned to attend. Unfortunately Google Maps couldn’t help me because the Flemish Parliament can only be found with the correct Dutch term which is “Vlaams Parlement” - unfortunately I haven’t included that word in my Dutch vocabulary before. Even the search for “trainstation, St. Gallen, Switzerland” (my current residence) doesn’t return the expected results, only the search “Bahnhof, St. Gallen, Schweiz” returns the correct address. I understand that it is impossible to incorporate a complete dictionary but at least the most common search terms and locations should be multi-language capable.
6. Include public transportation
   If you are not familiar with the public transportation system in a city you have two choices: (1) spend a lot of time trying to figure out what could be the right mode of transportation or (2) spend a lot of money on taxis. Google Maps Mobile should help me find the right choice of public transportation - not just from one station to the other but from my place of departure to the place of arrival.
7. Integrate, Integrate, Integrate
   The quality of Google Maps Mobile (as well as Google Maps) depends fundamentally on the amount of integrated data. A search for restaurants can only generate useful results, when a sufficient number of restaurants are stored in the database. Otherwise it is still better to “open your eyes and look around”. While most McDonalds restaurants can be found through Google Maps in Switzerland, the data was still missing in Belgium.

These improvements - if adequately implemented - could render tremendously useful application for everyone who is traveling regularly. The integration of Google Maps into the iPhone, BlackBerry and other mobile phones creates a huge user base that could tap into these services. Yet as long as the quality and utility from Google Maps Mobile is still not better than that of “looking and asking around” we won’t see large adoption.

Does this only apply to Google Maps? Not necessarily - the company that is able to provide this functionality combined with a sufficiently large user base will become the leader for location based services.

The picture that is shown with this post is currently uncredited because I couldn’t track back the source. If you know the source of this picture, please drop me an email.

Posted in mobile, user experience | Permalink | 3 Comments »

The convergence of different devices is an ongoing trend and some companies predict that by 2010, 500 million mobile phones capable of navigation will be sold annually. With this in mind one should think that location-based services will be "the next big thing".

Even though I am confident that there will certainly be significant growth in some areas (i.e. vehicle tracking, in-car traffic information) I doubt that someday everyone will be using Google’s "Search nearby" feature to find the next ATM, restaurant or supermarket.

Even though mobility and travel has increased tremendously, the majority of people still roam in just a few locations and in general they do not move far from home. Vacations and business travel are exceptions - the percentage of time individuals spend in locations they don’t know is very small.

The New York Times reports on a study that shows that humans are creatures of habit and never go to far from home.

New research that makes creative use of sensitive location-tracking data from 100,000 cellphones in Europe suggests that most people can be found in one of just a few locations at any time, and that they do not generally go far from home.

“Individuals display significant regularity, because they return to a few highly frequented locations, such as home or work,” the researchers found.

That might seem like science and mountains of data being marshaled to prove the obvious. But the researchers say their work, which also shows that people exhibit similar patterns whether they travel long distances or short ones, could open new frontiers in fields like disease tracking and urban planning.

As I said before, I strongly believe that there will be a market for location based services. Nevertheless I think one has to shift focus from the technical possibilities that GPS-enabled, connected mobile devices potentially offer. The key is to understand the potential users of these location-based services in order to be able to find the next "location-based killer app".

Read the full article in the New York Times here.

 

Photo courtesy of cmbjn843

Posted in customer insight, mobile | Permalink | 8 Comments »