Buy.com is letting holiday shoppers compare bricks-and-mortar store pricing to online discounts via a bar code scanning and speech recognition mobile application.

Consumers can scan product bar codes and confirm if a better deal is available at Buy.com. Customers can also use voice search to pull up product information.

“We’ve seen rapid growth in mobile shopping this year – customers want to shop when they want, where they want,” said Jeff Wisot, vice president of marketing at Buy.com, Orange County, CA. “With the surge in popularity in mobile shopping, we are constantly looking at ways to make our mobile platform richer and more user-friendly compared to competing retailers’ sites.

“Bar code scanning opens up our site to shoppers literally everywhere – even when they’re in the aisle of a traditional bricks-and-mortar store,” he said. “We hope that by giving them an easy way to run price comparisons while out and about, they’ll decide to buy from us instead, since we normally have the best price with free shipping.

“Having thousands of top marketplace sellers and more than nine million different products on our site, we’ve now empowered the consumer to shop on his or her own terms, and seamlessly compare pricing from almost anywhere.”

Buy.com is a retail marketplace, focused on providing its customers with a great shopping experience and a broad selection of retail goods at low prices.

Buy more
Consumers can compare prices and buy from more than the 9 million products featured from third-party retailers.

Additionally, customers can view product reviews and thousands of BuyTV videos directly on product pages and via their own video browse pages.

Consumers can view top-selling products, the deal of the day and weekly specials.

“We are looking to extend to other platforms,” Mr. Wisot said. “We have several on our roadmap – Android will be next.

“We plan to promote the offering to our customer base, through Web site and mobile traffic, as well as target mobile shoppers,” he said.

Categories
Consumers can browse different Buy.com categories, including baby, books, cameras, computers, health and beauty, gift cards, music, pet supplies, sports and toys.

“Earlier this year, we improved our mobile site with the addition of full search and checkout capabilities, and a faster, simpler platform,” Mr. Wisot said. “We also made it possible for customers to search through thousands of BuyTV product videos and top 10 countdowns, to help them make better informed decisions.

“We’ll continue to look for other ways to enhance our mobile platform; for example, eventually enabling consumers to complete most of the mobile shopping process using only voice,” he said.

Final Take
Rimma Kats is editorial assistant on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York