Crowdsourcing doesn’t do that well with stuff that changes on a week-to-week basis and is different by region as well. Last month’s soup price from a market 200 miles away is effectively useless when you’re in the local grocery today, but that’s what you tend to get with crowdsourced info. Look at websites for pizza coupons… they really aren’t that great or comprehensive and there’s maybe 10 or 20 active coupons per market, whereas there are tens of thousands of grocery products in each market with their prices changing every week.
Supermarket contains tens of thousands of products with weekly pricing changes. Trying to manage a database of that size would be difficult without some sort of automation. I doubt you would be able to pull pricing off of big market stores easily to update a comparison site. Would be cool though…..Surprised no supermarket has pitched this with a we will match any big store sale price all the time type thing.
“The “why” is because no one has done it yet. And no there is basically no chance of you getting a pricing list or access to loyalty card databases from any grocery chain. I think this could be a pretty cool smartphone app though. If you want to compare prices you snap the barcode, enter the price of the item and whether it’s regular price or on sale, and the app will pull up prices of the same item in stores in your area(these prices will come from other customers doing the same thing in other stores). “
You mean like http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/ ? It’s not crowd sourced but it’s accurate. Asda even guarantee to be 10% cheaper on your shopping based on data from that independent site.
Crowdsourcing doesn’t do that well with stuff that changes on a week-to-week basis and is different by region as well. Last month’s soup price from a market 200 miles away is effectively useless when you’re in the local grocery today, but that’s what you tend to get with crowdsourced info. Look at websites for pizza coupons… they really aren’t that great or comprehensive and there’s maybe 10 or 20 active coupons per market, whereas there are tens of thousands of grocery products in each market with their prices changing every week.
Supermarket contains tens of thousands of products with weekly pricing changes. Trying to manage a database of that size would be difficult without some sort of automation. I doubt you would be able to pull pricing off of big market stores easily to update a comparison site. Would be cool though…..Surprised no supermarket has pitched this with a we will match any big store sale price all the time type thing.
“The “why” is because no one has done it yet. And no there is basically no chance of you getting a pricing list or access to loyalty card databases from any grocery chain. I think this could be a pretty cool smartphone app though. If you want to compare prices you snap the barcode, enter the price of the item and whether it’s regular price or on sale, and the app will pull up prices of the same item in stores in your area(these prices will come from other customers doing the same thing in other stores). “
You mean like http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/ ? It’s not crowd sourced but it’s accurate. Asda even guarantee to be 10% cheaper on your shopping based on data from that independent site.