RedLaser.com

>> Hi. Today we're on the north side of Champaign. It's part 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. In particular we'll be working on actual assessment of an app that came out on your smart phones called Redlaser. >> Yeah. So Redlaser's 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 what you said. They could actually help save consumers money on the things they buy. You ready? >> Yeah. >> Let's go give it a try. First on my list is coffee. We 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 barcode. Does it 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. Maxwell House. 

$3.98. And $3.45. Got it. >> All right. So we're moving on to televisions now, and I think we'll go with the Visio 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. We'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. 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. There's also 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 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 good. >> Okay. Let's see about these batteries. 

Duracell. The store price is $7.99. Let's give it a scan. The cheapest -- Get 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 it difficult? Was it easy? Is this something that you would use in the future? Why or why not? And finally how can this app be improved? How could you make this better? Now I'm going to ask Julie  to join me back here on campus and we're going to 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 Julie 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 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. 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 this savings was for the big ticket item, the television, which accounted for the majority of the savings. So based on this experience, and this was both of our first time using a price search app, what did you think? Is this something that you'd want to use in the future, on 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 mediums. >> 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 shared a similar reaction. I found it to be fairly easy to use. It was very quick. The scanning process is 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 in the U.S., have a price matching strategy. 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 necessary. >> I found the same thing. Coffee, detergent, these lower ticket items, things that were less than twenty 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 in to 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. >> I agree. I agree. And it's -- One of the limitations is that not all retailers are members of the Redlaser family. So it has this app. Now it has about, what, 27-30 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 different, 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 were using this app. Just in general 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've talked about earlier in this course, a large number of Americans check prices, 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.