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. It 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 off to do their shopping. We're here today to work on our exercise on price search apps. In particular, we'll be working on actual assessment of an app that you can load on your smartphones called RedLaser. Yeah. So RedLaser is actually one of the most popular price search apps out there. It works through a lot of different phone platforms like iPhone, Windows phones, and Android. 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 that today. The purpose to get some hands-on experience using these apps, and to see to what you said they can actually help save consumers money on the things they buy. You ready? Yeah. Let's go give it a try. First of all, this is coffee need to find some coffee. Maxwell House. This is my grandmother's favorite coffee. Let's see here. Let's take out my, put this down. Open up RedLaser. Scan the bar code, 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. Got it. All right. So we're moving on to televisions now. I think we'll go with the Vizio here. Most scan the 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, yes t-shirts. I think I'll try these Jockey brands t-shirts. Size medium, not quite my size, but give it a try. Quick 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, see the cheapest online is actually more expensive,18.99, results are the same local retail price. Great. All right. So we're looking for detergent. I think we're going to go with this Gain here. All right. So let's find the bar code 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 good. Okay. Let's see about these batteries. Duracell. The store price is 7.99. Let's give it a scan. Put this back out of the way. So Duracell batteries. The 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 were. 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 a difficult, was it easy? Is it something that you would use in the future? Why or why no. Finally, how could this app be improved? How could you make this better? Now I'm going to ask Jolie to join me back here on campus. We're going to talk about our results, and to see to what degree they matched your results. We're are back here on campus. Take a look at our results. Trying to figure out how much money we would've saved having bought these five products using the RedLaser app. Also Jolie you have your results there. What did you find out? Would you've saved any money? Yeah. Actually I found that the local prices were the cheapest prices. They offer 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. 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 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 accounted for majority savings. That's true. So based on this experience, and this was both of our first-time using a price search app. Yeah. What did you think? Is this something that you'd want to use in the future, and 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 medias. Yeah. 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 quick. On top of this, one thing we didn't mention previously is that the retailer that we visited and many large retailers in the US 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 at a lower price at the retail store that you're out. 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. Yeah, I found that. So for that maybe the price matching might not be necessary. I found the same thing at coffee, detergent, these lower ticket items, things that were less than $20 or so weren't showing much of a difference. Right. So if you could think about the future of these price searching tools, what would be some areas for improvement? How could they work better? Right. So I think that 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. One of the limitations is that not all retailers are members of the RedLaser family. So as this app now it has about what 27 to 30 million users. As it gets more users not only customers but more retailers are associated with this network. It might gain added utility. So this app may look very different. It may have more functionality in a year or two from now. The other unique thing I noticed was that not many other people in the stores we're using this app. Just in generally, when I go shopping I don't see a lot of people using it. So I don't know what could help increase users. That's a good point. As we talked about earlier in this course, a large number of Americans check prices online, but it seems to be using different technologies, either a laptop, or an iPad, or perhaps using your smart phone but going to the retailer's 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.
