Hi. Welcome to our fourth and final exercise.
In this exercise, you'll have the opportunity to engage in
some hands-on price comparison activity
by using a price comparison app on your smartphone.
Now, as you know, the digital world is quickly changing.
Products come and go all the time.
So, unfortunately, when we shot the original video,
the app that we used, an app called RedLaser,
which was offered by Amazon,
was a great app and worked well,
but unfortunately it's no longer supported by Amazon.
But don't worry. You can complete this exercise in a number of ways.
For example, you could use another price comparison app,
perhaps one localized to your individual country or locale.
So, for example, in the US,
I would recommend using an app called
ShopSavvy which is currently functional and works really well.
If, for some reason,
you don't have a local app that works or you may not have a smartphone, now that's fine.
You can complete the exercise by simply using
the data that Jolie or I collected on our shopping trip.
Well, good luck with this exercise.
Have fun shopping.
Today, we're on the north side of Champagne in front of
a large retailer that our students often go to do their shopping.
And we're here today to work on our exercise on price search apps.
Particularly, we'll be working on
actual assessment of a app that came out on your smartphones called RedLaser. Yeah.
So, RedLaser is actually one of the most popular price search apps out there.
It works for a lot of different phone platforms like iPhone, Windows phones,
and Android, and it actually has over 27 million users.
RedLaser just does more than price searching,
but we really are just going to be focusing on the price search portion of the app today.
And the purpose is to get some hands-on experience using these apps and to see to
which extent they could actually help save consumers
money on the things they buy. Yeah. You ready?
Yeah. Let's go give it a try.
First on our list is coffee.
Need to find some coffee.
Maxwell House. This is my grandmother's favorite coffee.
Let's see here.
Take out my, put this down, open up RedLaser.
Scan the barcode.
It doesn't matter which way you put it.
Upside down is fine.
Okay. Store price is $3.86.
Lowest online price is $3.45,
and lowest local price is $3.98.
Let's write those down. Cost 3.98.
Okay.
And 3.45, Got it.
All right. So we're moving on to televisions now,
and I think we'll go with the Vizio here.
We'll scan the price tag right here.
So, according to RedLaser,
the best online price is $399 and it's the same at the store here.
But the best local price is actually $349 so that's pretty much a $50 discount.
I'll write that down.
Okay, looking for some t-shirts,
t-shirts, t-shirts. Oh, yes, t-shirts.
Think I'll try these Jockey brands t-shirts,
size medium, not quite my size but give it a try.
Click scan.
Got it.
Let's see. What do we have here for results?
These t-shirts, three in a pack,
Jockey,
cost $12 here in this store.
So the cheapest online is actually more expensive, $18.99.
It is also the same local retail price.
Great.
So, we're looking for a detergent.
I think we're gonna go with this Gain here.
Alright, so let's find the barcode first. There it is.
And we'll do a quick scan.
Awesome. So, according to RedLaser,
the best online price is $16.98 and
then the local price here at the store is $14.99 and the best local price is $14.97.
So this seems to be a relatively good deal.
Write this down really quick.
And we're done.
Okay. Let's see about these batteries.
Duracell, the store price is $7.99.
Let's give it a scan.
The cheapest, put this back out of the way.
So, Duracell batteries,
store price is $7.99 and the cheapest local price is actually a bit more expensive,
$10.99, and the lowest online price is in-between, 8.97.
That's it. We've finished our shopping trip.
Hi!
Now that you're back from your RedLaser shopping trip,
let's talk about how to complete the assignment.
There are three questions in particular.
First of all, please calculate the total amount of money you would have
saved using this price search app,
both in terms of internet retailers but also local retailers.
Also, think about the different categories and where the price savings,
where were they across all five categories or just a couple?
Second, I'd like your thoughts about how you felt using this app.
Were you comfortable using it? Was it difficult?
Was it easy?
Is it something that you would use in the future?
Why or why not?
And finally, how could this app be improved?
How could you make this better?
Now, I'm gonna asked Jolie to join me back here, on campus.
We're gonna talk about our results and to see to what degree they matched your results.
We're back here on campus taking a look at our results,
trying to figure out how much money we would have saved had we
bought these five products using the RedLaser app.
So, Jo Lee, you have your results there.
What did you find? Would you have saved any money?
Yeah, actually I found that the local prices were the cheapest prices.
They offered the most discounts based on what the app said.
That was a little more surprising to me just because I thought that
internet prices would provide the most discount.
Okay. So as a reminder,
this app gives us both not only internet prices,
but also the price of local retailers.
And I actually found something quite similar.
I found that the local prices were cheaper than the store prices,
but I did find something a bit different – that I would have saved a bit more money,
about $12 more, had we bought these products online.
However, most of these savings was for the big ticket item,
the television, which account for the majority of the savings.
So, based on this experience,
and this was both of our first time using a price search app.
Uh-huh. What did you think?
Was this something that you'd want to use in the future,
in future shopping trips?
Absolutely, yeah, just because of the discount offered.
I think that it would definitely be useful.
I did struggle a little.
There were some items that I tried scanning that didn't really register on the app.
It either couldn't find the UPC code or it wouldn't really
show the prices of other local stores or online.
I found the same thing. We had,
for example, trouble with the watches.
Yeah. Surprisingly, we couldn't get any price matching for watches.
I share a similar reaction.
I found it to be fairly easy to use.
It was very quick. The scanning process is super, super quick.
And on top of this, one thing we didn't mention
previously is that the retailer that we visited,
and many large retailers of the U.S.,
have a price matching strategy.
What that means if we show them the price from the RedLaser app,
if it's from a large retailer such as Amazon.com,
this store and others will actually match that app.
So, in a sense, that's another useful function.
You don't actually have to go to the internet provider.
You can use that information as leverage to get
a lower price at the retail store that you're at.
Exactly.
I think that the discount is definitely
worth it for bigger ticket items like the televisions.
But really, based on my results, at least,
there wasn't much of a price difference for smaller items,
like coffee or detergent or t-shirts,
so for that maybe the price matching might not be enough.
I found the same thing in a coffee, detergent, lower ticket items,
things that were less than 20 U.S. dollars or so weren't showing much of a difference.
Right, right.
So if you could think about, kind of,
the future of these price searching tools,
what would be some areas for improvement?
How could they work better?
Right. So, I think that, you know,
what we were talking about before with the difficulty that we were running into
with actually scanning the items or finding a lot of different data on it.
I think that's one of the big areas for improvement.
A lot more stores could enter in their data for
their prices just so that consumers could have access to more information.
Okay. I agree. I agree.
And it's one of the limitations is that not
all retailers are members of the RedLaser family.
So, has this app, now it has about,
what, 27 to 30 million users.
As it gets more users, not only
customers but more retailers associated with this network,
it might gain added utility.
So, this app may look very differently and have
more functionality in a year or two from now.
The other thing I noticed was that
not many other people in the stores were using this app.
Uh-huh. Just in general, even when I go shopping,
I don't see a lot of people using it so I don't
know what could help increase users or ---.
That's a good point.
As we talked about earlier in this course,
a large number of Americans check prices, check prices online.
But they seem to be using different technologies,
either a laptop or an iPad or perhaps
using their smartphone but going to the retailers' website.
Right.
So, this seems to be something that's still a work in progress but definitely promising.
Absolutely.
Well, that's what we found.
We look forward to hearing your results.
