Crowdsourcing Price Data

In Retailwire:  With discussion.

Can crowdsourced price data change shopping habits?

Comparing prices between brick-and-mortar grocery stores isn’t an exact science for even the most fastidious shopper. Even if someone is willing to drive from store to store to find a discount, it’s hard to imagine that person always getting the lowest price on every item they buy. The creators of a new app want to make finding the lowest price far easier.

Basket is a shopping app that aims to increase price transparency by using crowdsourced data to determine where a user can get the lowest price on the items on their shopping list, according to CNNMoney. Basket began its life, quite cleverly, as an app called StockUp, which gamified taking pictures of products and rewarded users with points and cash. The game allowed the creators to build out a database of 900,000 SKUs, which acted as the foundation of Basket. The app still enlists 5,000 “power shoppers” who continue to provide the app with SKU information from stores and uses an algorithm to predict impending price changes. ... "