Best Reading of the Day - Entry 0082 Amazon Image Recognition

Showrooming is the act of visiting a brick & mortar store to get the hands on experience with a product, in the showroom, then getting online to buy it for the best price.  This has been driving traditional retailers nuts for a while now.

My personal experience regards books and traditional bookstores such as the Borders that used to be across from 500 Boylston Street in downtown Boston.  First I would just snap a photo of a book that caught my eye, then visit Amazon.com to purchase it.  Later the Amazon.com app introduced barcode scanning, in-app, to better facilitate this practice.

Now Amazon has upped their game by introducing image recognition for the same behavior.

http://www.mobilecommercedaily.com/amazon-takes-showrooming-to-next-level-with-image-recognition

Here is a snippet from that article:

Amazon is tightening its grip on showrooming with a new image recognition application feature that cuts down on the number of steps it takes for a consumer to find and buy a product.

The new image recognition feature is called flow and builds on a previous bar code-based app technology that let consumers scan UPC codes on products to then shop them from Amazon. Amazon’s newest iteration of app-based showrooming comes at the same time that the company is trying to cozy up to retailers with a possible mobile point-of-sale service.Happy reading,

Another little story is worth digging in to regarding aggregated couponing:

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/219066/retailmenot-shopping-app-posts-huge-gains-claims.html

Here is a snippet from that article:

Apparently I am not alone in letting RetailMeNot’s geofenced app ping me whenever I pass or enter my mall parking lot. The coupon and offers Web site has only had its app in market a couple of years, with geofencing active for little more than a year. But according to its latest financials, mobile accounted for 13% of net revenues in fiscal 2013, up 213% to $26.6 million. For the fourth quarter alone, it saw mobile account for 15% of revenues, for a 179% gain to $11.7 million. In the fourth quarter, 88 major retailers were partnering with the company -- up from 65 just three months prior.
Happy reading,

J.W. Gant