Toronto-based Slyce has launched a new component to its coupon app SnipSnap that aims to make price matching easier for shoppers.
With the tool, called Scout, shoppers upload a photo of any product while in store and answer some questions in real-time via a chat-based interface. Using Slyce’s image-recognition technology, Scout instantly identifies the item and searches thousands of retail sites. It then price-matches the offer or finds a coupon or rebate, and ultimately shows consumers the best deal.
According to Slyce (a visual search and recognition company that acquired SnipSnap earlier this year), more than half of all retail chains in North America offer price matching. But a Forrester researcher study found that only 5% of shoppers have ever price matched.
“To do price matching well, you need to know all the rules of the stores and read the price-matching policies, which are lengthy documents,” said Ted Mann, founder and president of Philadelphia-based SnipSnap. “You have to search all the websites, and bookmark the pages or print them. Then you need to bring that into the store and show it to the cashier. Navigating all that is hard. And nobody had built an app to facilitate this.”
Not only does Scout do the price comparison, it also culls through all the retailers’ price-matching policies. “We can immediately say, ‘this is one that has the highest probability of getting a win,’” said Mann. “We serve that up along with the policy itself if you need to [hand it] to the cashier.”
Scout is accessed through a tab in SnipSnap — an app turns users’ pictures of paper coupons into a mobile coupon that they can redeem in store. Mann said the company wrestled with whether or not to launch Scout as a standalone app. “But we have five million users and they’re very active, so we figured, ‘why start over from scratch?’”
Scout’s user interface is set up to look like a concierge-style messaging application, much like Facebook’s Messenger-based assistant called M, or the new shopping concierge, Operator, developed by Uber co-founder Garrett Camp.
“What I think is unique about our approach is it’s all built to find you deals,” said Mann. “A lot of the other concierge experiences are around being a personal shopper, but in our case, there’s a personal deal finder.”
