In this new era of smartphones and shopping, consumers have access to gobs of information in stores: price comparisons, product reviews and even locations of alternative stores nearby where you can buy the same item. Many of the leading shopping apps also have barcode scanning ability.
Barcode scanning is great in theory but in practice my experience has been that scanners work less than 50% of the time, maybe less than 25% of the time on my Android EVO. Typically the barcode apps can’t get a fix on the UPC — there’s not enough light or you can’t hold the phone or item still enough — and you get this irritating “sphincter” action (the focus undulates in and out) but no match. Very often when there is a fix there’s no data. This is a huge problem.
This experience can result in what I will call “barcode rage,” which causes the impulse to throw your phone on the ground.
I was in the grocery store yesterday buying wine for Thanksgiving. Without my EVO I’d just look at prices and wine categories and make a decision. But because I had my phone I decided to scan barcodes to compare prices and get reviews on wines. It was a maddening experience as not one, not two, not even three different barcode apps could resolve the UPC codes on these bottles. I held the wine bottles in my hand; I scanned them on the shelf. Nothing.
Then I decided to search for the wines on Google. What I got was a lot of quasi-spam links to sites that didn’t really provide information about wines I was looking at. The results consisted of wine sites or blogs but most were SEO plays with little or no actual information on the particular wines I was evaluating (except the brand and vintage).
Ten blue links: search, click, back, click. The experience “sucked,” to use the vernacular. It reinforced to me why, in most situations, mobile search is really a back-up solution when there’s not an app. Unfortunately on my EVO I didn’t have any wine apps installed and it was too late to start going through them there in the store. So after about 25 minutes of trying various things I “went oldschool” and just picked a couple of bottles based on past experience.
In many situations smartphones in stores can really help consumers make better decisions or give them confidence to buy. But in many cases they can also slow you down and create tremendous frustration.
November 26th, 2010 at 3:37 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Greg Sterling, shoppetweets and SMBinfo, Mike Ripley. Mike Ripley said: @gsterling Barcode scanning & search not ready for Black Friday 2010 http://bit.ly/h7g5O4 Could QR codes find their niche? [...]
November 27th, 2010 at 1:58 am
Great post, Greg, and unfortunately, all too true.
The combination of poor lighting and and incomplete data can make for a frustrating experience with smartphone apps. This is one of the main reasons for our choosing a typical mobile interface for our free Hello Vino app (available on the Android Market). The simple drill-down / question and answer process allows for a quick and informative user experience. In your case (selecting a wine), I believe you would have found the Hello Vino app quite useful.
Sometimes, we have to put aside the sexy technology in order to provide the most efficient user interface and satisfying user experience.
Best,
Rick
November 27th, 2010 at 2:42 am
Barcode scanning individual items is not the right approach imo.
I think we’ll see one of two better options emerge: 1) The store broadcasts its current product inventory to my phone; or 2) My phone already knows the store’s recent inventory because my local search app knows where I am (eg Trader Joes) and knows what products are in stock via a store feed (think Google’s local product inventory feeds).
Ideally my phone app with then cross-reference the product inventory info with recommendations and reviews (ideally from people like me), present the results sorted by best recommended (perhaps with some price filtering) and you have a great experience. I bet we see this in the next year or two.
November 28th, 2010 at 4:58 am
In addition to Malcolm’s comments, today you’d get the best results from simply scanning the front label (and not the bar code). But in general, local comparison/ratings shopping will get better with time. As I’m sure you know, it’s all based on available data. So if people aren’t reviewing the wines and/or it’s a new wine, there won’t be any data to reference other than the wine maker’s. Just think of sites like Yelp when it first came out. Sure it was fun to use and a cool novelty, but there wasn’t much substance until time passed. One thing that would speed the process is better promotion by application makers and more integration by retailers and distributors into experiential marketing. My thought is the more sophisticated the item (e.g. wine versus the new pairs of sneaks) the longer user adoption will take simply due to the audience.
November 28th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Robert:
Agree in general that data will take time to develop in some categories. However, most of the data that people are looking for exist now but are not available to the barcode databases.
For example, expert sources such as the Wine Spectator and other traditional wine review guides (e.g., Hugh Johnson) have most of the data I was looking for but Scanbuy and others don’t have access to it.
Among the various scanning-capable apps, Google Shopper arguably has access to be most data available in any one place. But conventional Google search on a mobile device is a very frustrating and inefficient way to access this content in a store, as I was suggesting above.
November 28th, 2010 at 5:29 pm
Completely agree. Frustrating indeed.
In my opinion, the bar code scanners or applications that win out right in this space will be the ones that have the friendliest UI and encourage sharing and interaction simply by the nature of their design.
Originally these were developed to find the same product at the cheapest price regardless of location (online versus store), but for common items (e.g. wine) there needs to be more social interaction.
I know you were originally commenting on the shear frustration of the ability to even use the app – lighting, shaking, etc — but I question the usefulness in the design for typical user.
Seems like Google Goggles is half way there with image scanning. I get better results when I scan the label or the product itself than the bar code. But better solution is like Yelp mobile (sorry for mentioning again, I’m a fan) taken to the next level. Imagine, “find stores near my location,” “check-in at BevMo,” “view inventory,” “sort by category,” “red wine,” “type: pinot nior,” “from: chile” “list by price, stars, number of reviews, etc”
How was your wine by the way? Which did you select? What was it paired with?
November 28th, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Googles and Shopper are probably farther along in terms of UI, etc than others and may well win (Amazon will also win). Got a BR Cohn Cabernet. Pretty good.
November 29th, 2010 at 5:21 am
Would type ahead search (like Google Suggest) be just as satisfying as bar code scanning? Though we don’t have wine, Buzzillions will have more product reviews than any app/site out there (even Google)…..
but no bar code scanning yet…..the reason I suggest search is that some boxes have multiple bar codes so its hard to find the “right” bar code (like Costco), some places have exclusive colors and styles (like Williams-Sonoma) and some places like trader joes use non-standard, non-UPC internal only bar codes for most products since they are TJs only products (excluding the wine and beer of course)….interesting stuff. If you haven’t tried Justin wines then go for it. Anything they make is awesome. had some for Tgiving dinner.
November 29th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
The idea behind barcode scanning is that it gets information into the device more quickly. Anything that’s relatively easy and more accurate would be welcome. Label or image scanning (i.e., Google Shopper) is easier but less accurate at this point.
Thanks for the wine recommendation Jim.
November 30th, 2010 at 12:44 am
Greg
Sorry to hear about your frustrating experience. Agree with you that wine UPCs are harder to come by as many wine stores only recently went online. Our app, TheFind Mobile Shopping, that has been recommended recently by NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Cnet and others could be a better choice. It’s available for Android as well as on iTunes. The way we deal with the lack of UPC wine bar code information is by using search technology to treat UPC as a query that can have similar matches in addition to exact UPC results.
For example, looking for Shafer 2006 One Point Five Cabernet comes up with one UPC match from TheWine Barn, but multiple additional matches (stores) that dont have UPC information but sell the same wine bottle.
In addition, we automatically include Google results and Bing results as well as a link to Amazon’s results so you can get a complete view of the market with just one scan.
Siva
November 30th, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Thanks Siva.
August 12th, 2011 at 4:49 pm
[...] mainstream. Before they can be scanned users must download an app to read QR codes. I’ve also experienced my share of frustration with barcode scanning in the real world (though mainly with conventional [...]
August 12th, 2011 at 6:30 pm
[...] be mainstream. Before they can be scanned users must download an app to read QR codes. I’ve also experienced my share of frustration with barcode scanning in the real world (though mainly with conventional [...]
August 13th, 2011 at 5:20 am
[...] be mainstream. Before they can be scanned users must download an app to read QR codes. I’ve also experienced my share of frustration with barcode scanning in the real world (though mainly with conventional [...]
January 16th, 2012 at 3:06 pm
First of all, instead of using the ‘vernacular’, how about using proper English?
Read this sentence again, then find the mistake: “It was a maddening experience as not one, not two, not even three different barcode apps couldn’t resolve the UPC codes on these bottles.”
Secondly, and this is the real problem behind most of today’s “problems” (and truly becoming annoying), IT people should really stick to IT business, or else realize that they are going beyond simple problems of the given. The problem is that everything (irrespective of intentions which, I believe, are mostly genuinely good) prioritizes the acquisition of money – so you have loads of websites offering crap as long as they manage to get you to visit (SEO). Unfortunately even if you DID have wine apps installed, your frustration would not have been assuaged; indeed it might have even been exacerbated. It’s not the smartphones which slow you down- it’s this stupid system (which people have created and continue to nurture) that prizes greed and manipulation, “marketing ploys” and deceit as long as it is done in the glorious name of seeking wealth. It is the generation which believes in the Machiavellian “ends justify the means” (and stupidly attributes a dictum to a great political philosopher without actually verifying whether he ever pronounced it – spoiler: he did not) which is at fault. When we realize that content is far more important than “ease of access”, when we are ready to actually support those who provide rich content (instead of being demanding whiners), when we are ready to stop being so lazy, work that little harder, dig that bit deeper to get at the real information and reward those who actually try to put intelligent and informative content on the web, instead of awarding hits to silly sites based on SEO techniques, when we refuse to let the tech-savvy pirates of the web spam cyberspace with their empty but popular “content-free” websites thanks to their superior technological know-how, then that is when smartphones and all other technology will (once again) become useful. Till then, we have no one to blame but ourselves. As they say, only a bad workman quarrels with his tools.