Is Best Price Always the Best Offer? iPhone App Finds In-Store Deals Nearby You
SaleLocator.com a site which aggregates local information about shopping sales in your local area have launched an iPhone app that automatically searches for sales nearby you now.
The iPhone app launch follows SaleLocator.com’s public launch in February 2011 which indexes a daily average of 175k nationwide in the US. The benefits of the service are that users can monitor sales from a hundreds of different stores and across a broad range of interests, without needing to subscribe to email lists or sift through junk mail.
The iPhone app makes use of the GPS and maps functionality of the device and seamlessly weaves the sale data into user data to locate sales nearby you now or where you intend to be.
The sales can also be bookmarked on your phone and shared on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter.
What makes SaleLocator‘s offering unusual is that it is not a run of the mill comparison shopping site or app. They index and compare promotions rather than price, meaning that the technology can find similar but unique offers from companies such as ‘buy one, get one free’ or specific discounts on specific products.
This is good news for smaller, niche or ‘specialist stores’, as it means they don’t always have to compete on price. Price slashing can be a struggle for small businesses competing on daily deal coupon sites.
Whilst there are no plans to get into barcode scanning and in-store comparison shopping, as other mobile shopping apps such as Goodzer intend to, Udi Falkson, CTO of SaleLocator, said that they intend to form partnerships with other app developers to supply info of sales to them. For example, local sales and promotion data could be overlayed into services such as Bing Mall maps.