Big in Japan

You want to do what? The PayPal Story. . .

I just got off the stage at the PayPal Innovate09 Conference here in San Francisco and I thought it might be helpful to explain what we just demonstrated.  For those of you who missed it, here is the video:

[video coming soon]

For those of you who haven’t heard of ShopSavvy let me explain what it is all about.  ShopSavvy allows you to scan the barcode of any product and shows you pricing information about the product from local and online retailers.  Basically a barcode powered price comparison system on your smartphone.  More than a million users scan an average of 26 barcodes each month (between 600,000 and 1,000,000 each day).  If they actually want to purchase something they can either visit the website of the retailer and hunt and peck their payment details into the mobile browser or email an affiliate link to their email account to purchase later when they are back at their computer.  91% of the time the consumer is standing in the store ready to buy – i.e. they are in buying mode.  It was obvious to us that we needed to help them complete the transaction – making it SAFE and QUICK.

Earlier this year we approached PayPal and pitched them a simple idea we called QuickPay (check out our original demo on YouTube).  The idea was fairly simple, we wanted to allow users to easily buy the items they scanned without forcing them to visit the website of the retailer to complete the transaction.  Of course as simple as it sounds, the idea was fairly unique.  ShopSavvy wanted to get in the middle of a transaction between a consumer, a retailer and a payment processor – despite the fact that we weren’t (and didn’t want to be) party to the transaction.  Usually, to be part of the transaction you need to be a) the party who pays, b) the party who funds or c) the party collecting.  The existing workflows didn’t contemplate a facilitator like ShopSavvy. From the very start PayPal was intrigued.  By this summer we began working out the details and our goal was to be able to release QuickPay by November 3rd (my birthday and the date of the PayPal Innovate09 Developer Conference here in San Francisco).

The system is currently ONLY available on the iPhone (Android is coming soon) so we had to be able to release both the iPhone version of ShopSavvy AND QuickPay at the same time.  Today was the first public demonstration of the iPhone version of ShopSavvy (what did you think?).  Our goal is to have our first users buying goods using QuickPay by mid-November.  Here are screenshots of the workflow:

Our objective  is to make comparison shopping on the go easy and productive.  Instead of just informing the shopper as we have for the past year, now we are empowering the shopper to act on the information they receive.  If you are a retailer we are NOT talking to, feel free to email amuse@biggu.com to talk about how we can include you in our QuickPay launch.

Posted by amuse | November 3, 2009 - 2:32pm3 Comments
Category: ShopSavvy (iPhone)