Kamera Digital News

Services help shoppers with cell phones find merchandise

May 21st, 2007

Services help shoppers with cell phones find merchandise
Pittsburgh Post Gazette, PA
Sunday, May 20, 2007
By Teresa F. Lindeman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

It was winter 2005 and Alex Muller needed a sweeper. The New York City resident began wandering around looking for stores that might carry them. But he missed the Internet with its easy access to vacuum cleaner ratings, reviews and information on who might have good ones.

That experience inspired the Carnegie Mellon University alum to launch a shopping service for users of mobile phones, helping them search their cities for merchandise. His company offers Slifter.com, one of a rash of new services meant to make cell phones useful for more than calling home to see if she wanted blue or pink, and what size was that again?

It’s early yet to know which services will win out and what business model will prevail. Some offer programs that require consumers to pay fees, others are free to consumers — beyond air time or texting charges — with retailers paying for clicks. But, with Americans embracing handheld devices, the time may be near when a lot of shopping will be done, at least initially, by consumers letting their fingers do the walking on the cell-phone numbers pad.

Take the service offered by Frucall, a California company that consumers call from the local store to get online options. The Sears at Ross Park Mall recently had a Next Generation George Foreman Grill G5 on sale for $129.99. Typing in the item’s bar code at Frucall generated a report that it could be had at Amazon.com for $100, including estimated shipping costs.

There are other services along those lines, including one being tested by Yahoo!. But generally those pit online vs. off-line. Frucall can’t tell the shopper looking for a last-minute Christmas gift if the same grill is carried in other stores at the mall.

NearbyNow, another California venture, is working on that. This company is busy wiring malls to help those looking for, say, jeans to identify which stores carry the right brands. “Think about it as Google for the mall,” said Dan Steinman, vice president, customer relations.

NearbyNow set up its first mall in August in San Jose, Calif. Now it has more than 30 with a steady stream of new sites coming online. The closest to Pittsburgh is Westfield Belden Village in Canton, Ohio, which went live a few weeks ago.

For mall shoppers, signs will tell them to send a text message to a certain code. Once there, they can text, say, “jeans.” In the case of Belden Village, a message came back saying 45 stores carry them. A second message said Macy’s carried Tommy Hilfiger Boyfriend Jeans for $59 and Dillard’s had DKNY “Lud-Tlow” jeans for $48.

Information kept coming steadily as long as the user sent a code asking for more. Starting with a more specific search would make the hunt more focused.

Beyond inventory information, Mr. Steinman said the company had found that people want to know what’s on sale. Making the assumption that anyone sending in text messages is probably in the mall, the service may follow up its initial responses with alerts about sales or may offer discounts. “The theme of mobile search is going to be ‘never miss a sale,’ ” he said.

NearbyNow also offers a merchandise reservation service for those searching the mall’s Web site. After receiving a request, the company’s call center phones the store, which puts the item aside.

Proof this is still a work in progress is that not all the inventory at a particular mall is in the NearbyNow database. Chains that have Web sites with product descriptions already written are easy to load, but smaller retailers may offer only more general descriptions of the categories they carry.

Among the mall operators NearbyNow is talking with, Mr. Steinman said, are the owner of Monroeville Mall and Westmoreland Mall, and the owner of Ross Park Mall, South Hills Village and Century III Mall. He predicted the service would be in more than 100 centers nationally before the holiday shopping season.

Still, NearbyNow wouldn’t help find someone inside a mall discover that the same merchandise is available at a free-standing store across the street — something Mr. Muller hopes to do with GPShopper Inc.

His dream is to create a global positioning system of tracking down the stuff people want and taking them to it. For now, the GPS part is more goal than reality, but his service does claim to have inventoried more than 65 million items in 30,000 stores tagged by ZIP code.

A check of Slifter.com’s store listings for the Pittsburgh region shows plenty of gaps. Stores listed included Radio Shack, Best Buy, Toys R Us, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Office Max, among others. It’s a start.

Typing in “digital camera” for the Post-Gazette’s ZIP code brought up a selection: a Nikon Coolpix S9, a Barbie Digital Camera, a Large Camera Bag, Notebook Web Camera, Digital Spy Camera and so on.

Clicking on the Nikon Coolpix found five places to buy the camera — all for $249.95 — within 83.6 miles. The closest was a mere 0.55 miles away: Bernies Photo Center Inc. on East Ohio Street. There is an image, a description of the product, a note that it is in stock and, with another click, a map of the location. Then, more evidence of how new these services are: A call to Bernies draws a blank from the first employee on the phone, at least about the mobile shopping service. The store does carry Nikon cameras.

“I don’t know how we got on there,” said Jim Lynn, an employee who handles Web development for the store and its used-product sibling, Pittsburgh Camera Exchange. He supplies inventory information to search engines regularly and even uses his own Verizon Wireless phone to Google items and link with a GPS program to figure out how to get to the goods.

He hadn’t heard of Slifter.

On the other hand, he could report a slight increase in mobile shopping for the North Side business. In the last month, at least three orders to his employer’s Web operations came from mobile devices, more than usual.

Turns out Nikon itself put Bernies on this particular map. The company supplied a list of independent authorized dealers and arranged for its product to show up on searches. Nikon was happy to report 38 percent of users who received the link opened it, with nearly 7 percent of those sending a link to friends or family.

A Nikon spokeswoman described the service as “extremely compelling for brand marketers who are looking to interact with consumers while they are out and about, shopping.”

At the beginning of the year, Slifter had tallied more than 150,000 users, said Mr. Muller. That could grow with a deal expected soon partnering the service with a major cell-phone carrier.

The company, which has fewer than 25 employees and isn’t profitable, must tackle ongoing issues with pulling data from numerous sources and working through different phone carriers. Any industry player communicating with people’s cell phones has to think about privacy issues. Then there’s the challenge of keeping the in-stock information up to date.

Every night, the inventory status is updated. Mr. Muller has seen lots of searches for the Nintendo Wii game system. For products like that, which are in short supply, the service isn’t ready to help because no one wants customers to be disappointed. If there isn’t enough to get through a sales day, it won’t be listed.

But give the industry time. Just think how fast shoppers could move if inventories were updated every 15 minutes.

Entry Filed under: World Digital Camera