Online Store Coupons

Couponing fuels supermarket mobile apps

Will grocery shoppers casually scan a jar of peanut butter with their smart phone to find an online coupon?

Or will they use their smart phones to organize a strict shopping list and avoid splurging on an impulse purchases.

Those are suddenly billion-dollar questions in the grocery industry.

The opportunity to do something – anything – that combines the raging fad of couponing with Americans' love of cell phones has quickly triggered a rush of action and competition in the normally sleepy grocery market.

On one side are start-up companies like ShopSavvy, which had huge success with bar-code scanning to help people save money on electronics and clothes.

On the other side are grocery stores themselves like Target, Walmart and Publix, each hoping shoppers will use their store-brand apps instead, and spend more money in the aisles.

Regular people using mobile phones in the grocery aisles may seem like an outlandish idea, said Al Ferarra, director of retail services at accounting and consulting firm BDO, but not long ago, so did the idea of using a mobile phone screen for an airline ticket.

"Every day, people at airports show their phones to TSA agents to get on planes – It's normal," Ferarra said. "There's no question that supermarkets, and their suppliers, are going to start something in mobile."

ShopSavvy

The first companies to rush into mobile grocery tools were the start-ups.

More than 20 million people have already downloaded the ShopSavvy app for their iPhones and Droid phones – mainly to scan hard goods and apparel like televisions or shoes to find the best price online.

Now ShopSavvy is getting into grocery in a big way, and has cut deals with Walmart, Whole Foods, Rite-Aid, Safeway and others to gather their price data on products.

ShopSavvy officials envision two scenarios: Grocery shoppers scanning a jar of peanut butter to find coupons, or shoppers using the Web version at home to build a shopping list they use on their phones.

Saving 25 cents on peanut butter "may seem like a small amount," said John Boyd, co-founder of ShopSavvy. "But put together, it all adds up."

Here are some the players in the grocery app industry and their strategies.

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Coupons.com is already the largest online coupon site in the world, and the company has big plans for mobile too, though in a different scenario.

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