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Tag: price comparison

  • PayPal Acquires Price Comparison Tool Honey For $4 Billion

    PayPal Acquires Price Comparison Tool Honey For $4 Billion

    PayPal has announced its acquisition of Honey Science Corporation, a price comparison platform that helps shoppers save money.

    Honey was founded in 2012 and provides promo codes, discounts and online coupons to customers. Customers can even add items to their list and be notified if the price drops. The company’s addition will help PayPal further simplify the online shopping experience and be a valuable tool for PayPal’s network of merchants.

    “The acquisition supports PayPal and Honey’s shared mission to simplify and personalize shopping experiences for consumers while driving conversion and increasing consumer engagement and sales for merchants. The combination will help accelerate growth across both companies. Honey will accelerate its growth by driving adoption among PayPal and Venmo’s more than 275 million active consumer accounts and sourcing exclusive offers from PayPal’s extensive network of 24 million merchant accounts. Honey will enable PayPal to reach consumers at the beginning of their shopping journeys and will enhance PayPal’s ability to help merchants acquire and convert consumers by delivering offers that are personalized, timely, and optimized across channels.”

    Amid increasing competition from Apple Pay, Google Pay and other digital wallet systems, PayPal also hopes the acquisition will help it drive user engagement.

    “Honey is amongst the most transformative acquisitions in PayPal’s history. It provides a broad portfolio of services to simplify the consumer shopping experience, while at the same time making it more affordable and rewarding,” said Dan Schulman, president and CEO of PayPal. “The combination of Honey’s complementary consumer products with our platform will significantly enhance our ability to drive engagement and play a more meaningful role in the daily lives of our consumers. As a partner of choice for our merchants, this is another way that we can help them build and strengthen their customer relationships, provide personalized offers, and drive incremental sales. The combination of Honey and PayPal adds another significant and meaningful dimension to our two-sided platform.”

  • Amazon May Block In-Store Price Comparisons With New Patented Technology

    Amazon May Block In-Store Price Comparisons With New Patented Technology

    A patent purchased by Amazon may pose potential privacy issues. Named, “Physical Store Online Shopping Control,” this technology has the capability to track shoppers within their brick-and-mortar stores.

    If shoppers connect through the store’s wifi networks, this new system can track their online activity and interfere with it. This prevents shoppers from what has been labeled as “mobile window shopping,” where customers use their smartphones to compare product prices as they walk around the store. The system is also able to track and monitor the shopper’s network and detect their location within the establishment.

    If a shopper decides to search online for similar products, an algorithm would detect the traffic and attempt to override the results. One of the following could be executed: it could block access to a competitor’s websites, which prevents customers from viewing similar products; redirect customers back to Amazon’s own website or other Amazon-approved websites; send a notification to a salesperson to approach the customer; or it could send customers’ smartphones a text message or other notifications designed to entice them back.

    This new patent becomes even more significant when you consider that Amazon has been expanding its physical presence. With over half a dozen brick-and-mortar bookstores and their recent purchase of supermarket chain Whole Foods, the company will eventually end up controlling over 470 retail establishments. This gives Amazon enormous incentive in ensuring that their customers won’t be looking elsewhere while inside their stores.

     

    Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said that regulators should be on the lookout for potentially anti-competitive behavior. “Amazon has created a largely stealth Big Data digital apparatus that has not gotten the scrutiny it requires,” he added.

    Amazon has not yet responded on whether they will implement this initiative. Holding a patent does not necessarily mean the company will use it. Some file for patents to reserve the right to use it later on, while others do so to prevent competitors from using it.

    However, if such a technology is implemented, companies will be able to direct and manipulate consumers’ purchasing behaviors, which causes privacy issues for the customers. The online retail giant has shown support for a free and open internet when they signed on for a July 12 protest against the FCC’s initiative to roll back rules regarding net neutrality.

    Product—and price—comparison was one of the main selling points for Amazon when it first launched in 1994. Mobile window shopping enables consumers to “get a feel” of physical products before purchasing them online. This new technology suggests that “the company’s new patent is aimed to protect it from just such behavior as it enters the storefront arena.”

    For now, it seems like one way to bypass this system is for consumers to use their own cellular data when browsing within Amazon-owned shops. According to Gizmodo, however, ” that’s a scenario that the average consumer would revolt against, for now. But it’s an example of how tricky a truly dominant corporation could be if it runs rampant.”

  • How We’re Using Our Mobile Devices [Nielsen Study]

    With over half of America already using smartphones and about 20% owning tablet computers, it’s interesting to take a look at how we are using these devices, and also how they are changing our lives.

    This is what Nielsen set out to do with their latest study, and guess what what they found out? Well, like any good research effort, once the results are in, it seems like common sense. We like to shop. No really, that’s what they found out. Like I reported earlier this year, smartphones are the new window shopping.

    Mobile devices and the internet in general bring a lot more power to the shopping experience. Nielsen reports that nearly 80% of smartphone and tablet users are taking advantage of those devices for shopping-related activities. They are doing things like reading reviews, checking pricing, looking for stores, writing product testimonials, searching for coupons, and creating lists.

    Remember the old fashioned times when you had to buy an issue of Consumer Reports and hope they reviewed the stuff you were thinking about buying? Now you jump on YouTube, look for a product demo, or go on a retailers website and read a bunch of consumer reviews. You can check the top ten distributors on pricing in probably five minutes. Window shopping has never been so much damn fun.

    Save on the leg work and save on gasoline, and to top it all off, get the best prices, free shipping, and the peace of mind that only peer reviews can provide. Of course Nielsen, we are using our mobile devices for shopping. We love it!

    Take a look at what they found: