The team here at Big in Japan wants to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving. Many of you will be hitting the malls tomorrow and we wanted to remind you to use ShopSavvy to ensure you are getting the best deals. There are going to be some GREAT deals in stores this weekend, but you need to be vigilant - some deals won’t be as great as they seem. ShopSavvy can help.
After the dust has settled, please take a moment to let us know if you were able to save any money using ShopSavvy. The folks at Good Morning America and Oprah are VERY interested in hearing from real people who used ShopSavvy and ACTUALLY saved money. If you can describe your ShopSavvy experience in a sentence or two and either post to the ShopSavvy Facebook Group or email it to sales@biggu.com (make sure you include your name, address and phone number) we will pass along your experience to the producers (indicate if you would be willing to be interviewed on air in your message).
Nokia has announced they will stop selling handsets in Japan. Japan is the fourth largest mobile phone market, but the company has never been able to make inroads with the tech-savvy Japanese consumer. More from Sachi Izumi. Good news, we are still… Big in Japan!
Got a call today from a potential user in Phoenix this afternoon indicating he didn’t see ShopSavvy in the Android Market. I couldn’t believe it, thought maybe he was pulling my chain. I handed the call over to Jason who ultimately figured out the user didn’t have a SIM card in his G1. Since we have ‘internationalized’ ShopSavvy for each market (US, UK, Germany, Austria, Poland, Czech Republic, Holland, Japan and China) your location is important to which application you download. Without a SIM you don’t have a location and as a result you don’t see ShopSavvy (along with a few other applications that need your location to set their language and other features).
If more users go the ‘unlocked’ route, we may rethink the strategy, but for now you can only get ShopSavvy if you have SIM for a country we support. If you are located in Africa you won’t be able to user ShopSavvy - i.e. because online retailers do not ship across major international borders and we don’t have a single retailer in Africa at this point. I hope this makes sense.
Circuit City (filed Chapter 11)
Ann Taylor- 117 stores nationwide closing
Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug ,and Catherine’s to close 150 stores nationwide
Eddie Bauer to close stores 27 stores and more after January
Cache will close all stores
Talbots closing down specialty stores
J. Jill closing all stores (owned by Talbots)
Pacific Sunwear (also owned by Talbots)
GAP closing 85 stores
Footlocker closing 140 stores more to close after January
Wickes Furniture closing down
Levitz closing down remaining stores
Bombay closing remaining stores
Zales closing down 82 stores and 105 after January
Whitehall closing all stores
Piercing Pagoda closing all stores
Disney closing 98 stores and will close more after January.
Home Depot closing 15 stores 1 in NJ ( New Brunswick )
Macys to close 9 stores after January
Linens and Things closing all stores
Movie Galley Closing all stores
Pep Boys Closing 33 stores
Sprint/Nextel closing 133 stores
JC Penney closing a number of stores after January
Ethan Allen closing down 12 stores.
Wilson Leather closing down all stores
Sharper Image closing down all stor~s
K B Toys closing 356 stores
Loews to close down some stores
Dillard’s to close some stores
HTC reported they would ship around 600,000 G1s this year. Forrester figured 300,000 to 400,000. Turns out they were both wrong - really wrong! HTC is going to ship more than a million of the hot little handsets before the end of year according to Digitimes. This is a 67% under estimate! We are seeing more 1,000 new users register each day - if this is any indication of sales I think it is going to be a great Christmas. T-Mobile, you rock! Via Silicon Alley Insider.
I was reviewing my favorite new source, Valleywag, and I was reminded that it took Apple 74 days to sell a million phones. The G1 will have sold more than a million in 70 days! Holy bat-phone!
ShopSavvy is making the rounds on local and national television. Last week ShopSavvy made an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel as well as a CW stations across the country. Local pieces include ABC, CW and Fox:
Check out Samsung’s latest ‘folding’ phone. Amazing stuff:
Almost 20,000 ShopSavvy users took the time to register the application, THANK YOU! These registrations make it possible for us to sort shopping data by the demographics of the user making our data saleable (i.e. so we can keep ShopSavvy free on the G1). The registrations keep coming in, more than 1,000 each day, again THANK YOU!
It is easy to say thank you on a blog or our facebook group, but do you ’show’ your users your appreciation? Here at Big in Japan we ask for ‘big expensive gifts’. Since we have the address of our registered users we decided to send a note as well as some stickers - how much would that cost us? Assuming we only sent these to our current registered users we were looking at around $50,000 on the low end! We have generated a little revenue, but not that much. Surely there is a way to reach out to our users for less money. So we had an idea, we need to find someone with deeper pockets to pay for the mailing.
We figured that a manufacturer (maybe Griffin) would be interested in offering accessory information and perhaps a ’special discount’ for ShopSavvy users in our ‘joint mailer’. Basically, our partner would gain access directly to users who might have a real interest in their offer and we would be able to send a tangible thank you to everyone who registered. What do you think? Is this a good idea? Of course we would ONLY partner with someone relevant to the phone - i.e. no credit card offers please! If you are a manufacturer ping us at sales@biggu.com if you are interested in helping us thank our users.
It had to happen, spammers are trying to add UPC spam to ShopSavvy via Google Base. Scan Kleenex and get an iron (or worse). We hope that these sort of ‘fake’ results for scanned items are an anomaly, but they have our attention. Scores of local and online retailers have contacted us about getting ‘on’ ShopSavvy. We settled on Google Base as the standard way smaller online or local retailers could get their items on ShopSavvy. I wrote about it here: How to get your items on ShopSavvy. The good news ANYONE can get their items to show up as online or local results, the bad news is that ANYONE can add anything to Google Base. The openness of the platform means that it is open to spammers and jokesters.
We are in the process of creating what amounts to a spam filter for UPC data. The system will be fairly simple allowing for a white list (trusted retailers who use Google Base), a grey list (retailers who use Google Base, meeting a certain set of electronic data criteria we develop) and a black list (retailers who don’t meet our criteria or those we KNOW are bad actors). So instead of working on cool new features this month, we will be fighting the SPAMMERS! Again, thanks for the feedback…
We thought it might make sense to take the ShopSavvy conversation to a more social venue and Facebook seemed like the obvious choice. Feel free to join the ShopSavvy group on Facebook today!
We made the local news last night here in Dallas. Check out the video here.
ShopSavvy Coverage -
