Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

• How to to make an ecoupon
• How to approach the retailers to develop relationships (After all Upromise have established partnerships with the companies)
• How to make sure I don`t do anything that copyright infringes (Upromise is not the only company that uses ecoupons, but I do want to be careful)

I definitely like your first idea a lot. I think it has a lot of promise, and would be especially useful in these economic times. Are you sure you will need to input all the bar codes? Maybe there would be an easier and less time consuming way to track prices? Maybe you can even start out by just having your local grocery stores send you price information or sales published in their circulars?

As for the second idea, I somewhat understand the concept, but I guess I`m not fully getting it. Maybe I`m just a little confused as to exactly what information would go on their cards. And are we referring to credit/debit cards or a customer loyalty card similar to a walgreens card?



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Motivation for Entrepreneurs
Entre-Propel.com

Your first idea brings me more interest than the second.
However ... I agree with Matt ... in hoping there is an easier way than the barcode idea.
What if you narrow down the scope some to only the main grocery stores?
Don`t include every grocery retailer?
Sam .....




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power your world with a wind generator

Actually, I was going to say the first idea isn`t all that great, and I see I`m disagreeing with previous posts. :-)

But here`s the thing: Not so long ago I was doing fine, had lots of money, and never even bothered to look at prices in the grocery store. I should mention I love to cook and shop, and spent a lot of time in food stores.

Things got bad, then really bad. I not only had to look at prices, but soon had to develop a fundamentally different approach to shopping for food and groceries.

I discovered that I don`t care at all about weekly sales, ads, or even the price differentials between stores. What matters is to understand the buying cycle for each store so I can learn "close-dated" sale items. These are things with expiration dates, where the store will drastically cut the price 3 days before expiration.

None of these appear in any ads, they`re done only in the store. I also found that certain stores specialize in various items, but the only way to know that is by shopping them regularly. So one store is our "go-to" place for pork, where another is where to buy eggs and milk.

Additionally, and most importantly, by carrying around a database of current prices for my entire larder in my mind, I can easily find "instant deals" where a department manager wants to get rid of something quickly. We walked into a store at the right time, and saw Alaska king crab legs marked down to $4 for an entire package. They`d been frozen, and the expiration was approaching.

Ordinarily crab legs go for $15-20/package.

So the problem with the first idea is that it gives us a lot of information that really isn`t helpful, particularly as people begin having to pay close attention to their shopping and prices. It "appears" to be useful information, but it isn`t.

Hmm....we already know you`d have a major research project, ongoing, never ending.

What about modifying the actual implementation, but keeping the underlying idea----to help people food-shop smarter.

Why not build an information site, perhaps starting using blog software. Given the "article" orientation of blogs, you could easily write articles that would target particular aspects of this type of shopping.

You also could quickly insert articles about specials, deals, or reasons why one store is better than another for say, produce or bread or meat.

The blog would automatically provide searching, categories, and all sorts of things similar to a database, and you wouldn`t have to start from scratch.

Some articles could be about topical concepts, like close-dated purchasing, bulk shopping, how to use a freezer, portion management and things like that. Others could be targeted to shopping for singles or older couples, recipes for large families, and things like how to make a whole turkey into meals for a family for a month.

It`d sure reduce your research, and would give you almost an instant "on" capability, to test the idea and what would be important for a dedicated Web site.

Or it can make them look good...

Think about it this way, if you are looking for the best prices possible, you still aren`t going to run to five different grocery stores to take advantage of all the sales, you are going to go to the one that offers the biggest savings from the most sales.

If there is enough viewership, grocery stores may very well send you their prices since the exposure is good for business, especially if they are running more sales than the competitor. Their price of, say bread may not be better but their prices of five other different items might be.

That said, it might actually be useful to include kind of a "total savings analyzer" on the site, where the user would enter their grocery list, and the site searches the pricing for the list. It spits out the grocery store that would yield the biggest savings based on the entire list.


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Motivation for Entrepreneurs
Entre-Propel.com