Are there any really GOOD grocery list/coupon organizer programs?

[Walter Mitty]

What do people in that culture expect to pay for an app?  I've read somewhere that they consider anything over $1 to be overpriced.  And that's independent of whether they get $20 worth of value or not.  does everybody in that culture think alike?  Or are there people who would think that it's cool to pay more for an app than the average person does?

Don't laugh.  There are people who think it's cool ot pay more for clothing than other people do.  And there are people that serve that segment of the market.

[Origisaurus]

From an economic standpoint, there seems to be a saddle point where organizing coupons can start to pay off.  IOW, for me shopping only for myself, the the potential savings don't justify the ongoing data input cost.  And I can't justify cost of a smart phone.

In most cases, "app" is another word for "toy".

But most folks, especially proles, don't do cost/benefit analysis.  They will overpay for glitz and bling, and then turn around and try to thrift down on something really valuable.


OTOH, the head cashier at the store where I worked shopped for herself and two married daughters.  Using coupons and her "valued customer" card, she would routinely save 50% or even 90% on a basketful of groceries.  The checkout process was quite impressive to watch.  First ring up the sales, second scan the card, then scan the coupons, so you could see the savings at each stage.  And a yard or more of register tape.  I think she had the daughters clipping all the coupons.

[I D Shukhov]

I don't think I'd buy this app.  I eat low-cost anyway:  no meat, no desserts -- just organic vegetables, tofu, bread (if I had the time I'd bake my own bread in a bread machine) and either soy burgers for lunch or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn burgers, which I like better but am suspicious about because it's unclear what "microprotein" really is.  I'm trying to get rid of dairy products from my diet.  I buy the same thing each week.  The store I go to has a coupon book, which this thread is reminding me I need to start looking at.

As far as the app goes, I don't know how much money could be made off it.   I'm pretty sure that the skills you would acquire by doing the project would be very valuable and would enable you to create other hybrid smartphone/web-based applications.

[Carrie Cobol]

What do people in that culture expect to pay for an app?  I've read somewhere that they consider anything over $1 to be overpriced.  And that's independent of whether they get $20 worth of value or not.  does everybody in that culture think alike?  Or are there people who would think that it's cool to pay more for an app than the average person does?

Don't laugh.  There are people who think it's cool ot pay more for clothing than other people do.  And there are people that serve that segment of the market.

I've been "in" the app culture for a while, and read blogs by my favorite indie game developer who sold one of his games ported for the iPad through iTunes for the first time last spring.  That audience is extremely price sensitive.  Typically things priced more than about 2$ are viewed as expensive so they'd better have a large usability.  (Replayability or longer hours of playtime for games, more features for non-game apps.)  My indie dev guy came up from the shareware game days and for almost twenty years has only charge $20 - $25 for his games on the Mac and Windows platforms.  He wanted to charge the same for the iPad, but discovered that it just wouldn't sell so he had to price it at 9.99.  I find his experience to be interesting because he designs his games for double or more re-playability.  (You play as one character, then do it again as another one, etc.)  Despite his overall quality being superior to most other games, and his extraordinarily high replayability, there is still criticism of his 9.99 price point.  However, the reviews (which work alot like word of mouth advertising) are overall so positive and there are a lot of reviewers who reassure newbies that the game is totally worth the high price, so he's got that going in his favor.

Back to the grocery coupon concept.  I got my first iphone last week, and immediately shopped for some sort of grocery list organizer app.  I found Grocery Gadget and hubby and I have been using the free version to demo it.  So far so sweet.  It allows us to share one grocery list and syncs them automatically via wifi or the phone's 3g - the database is kept on their site rather than locally.  Which means I can add an item when I'm at work, and DH can hit the store on his way home from work and will see the item on the list on his phone.  It has all the capabilities we've discussed here, with the exception of a link to store inventories.  It has it's own database of generic grocery items, that you can then customize with UPC codes, label pictures, comments, etc.  But you have to make a note in your list which store you shop at, or which store carries that product.  It doesn't handle coupons on it's own, but it will interface to the major coupon software apps like groupon.  Pretty sexy!

[The Gorn]

Carrie gets it, finally. I'm just describing a possible opportunity, not presenting a concept that should be analyzed endlessly for cost effectiveness and market researched endlessly for price points.

Couponing (the activity) can result in people walking out of grocery stores with several hundred dollars of merchandise that they paid perhaps $20 for. If you could partially automate the most tedious parts of this process (it takes hours both for the research before hand and for the shopping trip itself) by databasing and organizing the coupons using software, the cost effectiveness of a $20 application would be absurdly obvious to its customers.

One reason that database programs in general are not as useful as they could be is in coping with external data sources, especially real life ones. This is sort of a boundary of the effectiveness of database applications. As long as all content sources are digital and are presented in a near obvious format, everything is good. Once you deviate from those clean sources of data you can (in my opinion) find economic opportunities - activities that so far are impervious to computerization.

I have run into this problem with contact management software. Say I have a web site address for a business. It would be *nice* if a contact manager could just take the URL and parse as much company specific information from the web site as possible into a database - street address, email addresses, names of key executives, phone numbers. Nobody does this. Why? It's hard and messy. But it would have a lot of value.

A Mac program called "Delicious Monster" solves this problem by scanning the bar codes of media. But that's kind of an easy problem because there are sources of data online for the bar codes of media.

Finally, about cost barriers to cell phone apps. Yes, yes, yes, there is the $1 or $2 barrier that "nobody" wants to pay. I bought a smartphone so I actually have something to say about this subject based on experience, not hearsay.

What you find in the Android marketplace is that free apps are usually extremely limited, or do generic things like system administration functions on the phone (file browsers and "settings" programs to make settings more convenient), or... are free versions of "real" applications that cost $3.95 to $20 in most cases.

I do believe there is a price barrier but as Carrie indicated it's more like $10 to $20, and in part you can rationalize this by the fact that tablet and phone apps contain extremely simple GUIs compared to desktop applications, and are not expected to be as feature rich. Most phone apps are pretty dedicated in specific ways and don't have a richness of options. They tend to do exactly one thing. They should be easier to develop than a nominally similar desktop app.

Also the market for cell phone apps is much more social so you should expect much more fluidity in the market for cell apps than for desktop apps. The phone is a communication device. People tell each other about applications that they have downloaded, and of course you can just show someone what you bought and how it works by showing them your phone. Inherently you should be able to sell many more cell apps than desktop apps.

What kind of application would sell in the upper price range of, say, $15? For example, an application that transforms the phone into a fully functional and extremely enhanced GPS for hikers. Yeah, there are free GPS applications for Android and they hardly do anything except track your movements.

People will pay for real solutions:

OTOH, the head cashier at the store where I worked shopped for herself and two married daughters.  Using coupons and her "valued customer" card, she would routinely save 50% or even 90% on a basketful of groceries.  The checkout process was quite impressive to watch.  First ring up the sales, second scan the card, then scan the coupons, so you could see the savings at each stage.  And a yard or more of register tape.  I think she had the daughters clipping all the coupons.

This hits on two points - how much can be saved, and the amount of labor is alluded to. Couponing is a cost-benefit equation that the public has been "educated" upon, so this really isn't a stab in the dark.

This is big news in the media today. I believe a good number of commercial successes are due to the right product arriving when the public can appreciate it.

I believe that someone will attempt a handheld app like I am describing and it will sell for real money, not for 50 cents.

[Origisaurus]

Carrie gets it, finally. I'm just describing a possible opportunity, not presenting a concept that should be analyzed endlessly for cost effectiveness and market researched endlessly for price points.

OK, I got it.  Being too close to the concept and too far from the bleeding-edge technology,  I reacted to the concept.

The opportunity has some feas on it.  And any script-kiddie could probably make enough money for a few dime bags in his few nanoseconds of stardom.

OTOH, the right combination of utility, ease of use, marketing and price point could make some serious tokens over a longer stretch of time.

Everybody shops in the supermarket.  Nobody (except BHO's "one percent") has too much money.  That's the lure.  As I'm still learning after several decades of angling, the presentation of the lure is crucial.  And please feel free to use the case history (fictionalized, of course) of  Louise, head cashier saving big money week after week.  Although I seldom get to the $100 plateau for the 10¢/gallon gas discount, or maybe because of that, I would intrigued by a $20 app that could pay for itself in a few months, with of course minimal effort on my part.

Point is, you can't just publish your brain child and go immediately to planning your next extravagant purchase.

One possible downside.  The product manufacturers redeem the coupons because it increases sales and manufacturing volume.  But there must be a point where redeeming too many coupons cuts into profits.  So an app that makes it easy for consumers to use too many coupons may have a limiting factor to it.  Make hay while the sun shines.

[The Gorn]

There is a bar to entry for extreme couponing - the kind that would cause companies like Proctor and Gamble to go belly up if everyone did it - and that is time, organization, and effort. The time and effort required to clip and collect coupons and the time it takes to make a shopping trip based on coupons.

A really effective application that truly makes couponing so easy that it breeds new extreme shoppers in large quantities would, as you observed, result in coupons being severely limited somehow.

[Walter Mitty]

I was going to comment on the coupon makers earlier, but I cancelled my post. 

I imagine that coupon makers like it when the are a very small number of extreme couponers out ther getting a lot of publicity.  They act as shills,  drawing more of the people they really want into the coupon orbit.

But I'll bet they don't like a much larger number of couponers who save about 50% and rarely buy something they wouldn't have bought anyway.  And if apps make it easy to join that crowd, as they inevitably will, the couponers will have to come up with countermeasures.

[TRexx]

OK, this is sort of on topic.

I finally took the plunge and bought an iPhone. So far it's very cool but I haven't yet hit the "how did I ever live without this" stage.  Apples App store is full of all kinds of goodies, but I'm having trouble finding a specific app, although they have a couple that claim to help you manage coupons. 

The app I'm looking for lets you store the barcodes on all those discount cards issued by your local supermarkets and projects them onto the checkout scanner.  I remember seeing someone use it last year, but I'm not sure what flavor phone he had.

[The Gorn]

The app I'm looking for lets you store the barcodes on all those discount cards issued by your local supermarkets and projects them onto the checkout scanner. 

You really have to watch that if you have the concept of shopper points. Kroger's scanners will accept any card in my wallet: the pet food store, competing supermarkets, etc. So you have to choose the correct card image for that store. Otherwise you will effectively lose points.