You are assuming a store like walmart doesn't differentiate itself from other stores by having an easier return policy, or that target doesn't differentiate itself with a nicer store.

If you could get 1 store to adopt this system, others may follow since they would be losing out to store 1. Would it take a while? Yes, Would it be really, really tough, yes. Has it happened before in other industries? Absolutely: Airlines, Hotels, Its happening with cars, carwoo. etc. etc. etc.

So, while you may think it is a terrible idea, and it very well may be a terrible idea, it could also be a very achievable idea.

To me, it is more like the steam engine concept. It may not happen exactly as the OP describes it, but my guess is it will happen in time no matter what.

[added] for those that say no store will ever agree, that is a really bold assumption. You may be right, but if you just worked on getting 1 store in 1 industry online, then got a competitor, then got another one it could work.

I'm talking about the "normal" stores, the ones that might have 1 or 2 locations in one city, or have 2 or 3 locations across the country, the stores that rely on brand loyalty and don't compete with their competitors on $0.01 difference.

No small business would ever choose to compete on $0.01 price differences; the idea the OP is proposing would cause exactly this.

And then as you said, once one business does it, the others follow so that they don't become disadvantaged.

It would seem to me that the key to success is ensuring that your inventory management software is highly intuitive and easy to use for the time-poor business owners.

You could have all kinds of cool extensions, such as ordering ahead of time on your phone and having pick-up drive-thrus at big box stores and supermarkets, where payment could be taken care of automagically, via NFC. You could sort not just by price, but by price + time/distance from current location (the latter for gas costs) + tax, sort of like Hipmunk's "agony" sorting feature for airfare. You could make a shopping list and the app would optimize which stores to buy which items at, and in which order you should visit the stores, based on things like individual item costs, geographical locations of stores, opening/closing times, delaying of purchasing of frozen foods, etc.

But retail outlets will never cooperate. They'll be the big losers here, as the last barriers to comparison shopping disappear and customer loyalty is replaced by the cold, hard facts.

Where it shines would be for something semi-obscure: "I need a plumbing snake" or "I need some fabric glue". Do they carry that at my grocery store? What about Wal-Mart? Where's the nearest specialty store that might have it? If I can just type the product in and know which stores have it, that saves me a ton of aggravation -- and might, as a byproduct, mean I do some other shopping at that store instead of my normal place.

1. Heading to a grocery store with a list of items that you frequently buy that are priced at similar prices at every store.

2. Going to a store to purchase a specific item

3. Going to a store to find an item

For case #1 it's most likely that you're shopping at a place that is already competing for the lowest price point (places like Walmart and Target) so this application would be useless to you; however these stores already engage in the sort of activity the OP discusses.

For case #2 if it's an item you've purchased previously you probably have a "favourite" store, one that you used previously and had a good experience with so naturally you go to this store. If this is an independent store they might have the item for $5 more than another store of a similar type, but because you've used this store before and because it has always been cheaper on previous occasions you bet that extra $5 against the time investment of finding if it is cheaper elsewhere (which isn't guaranteed) and go with the "safe" option.

If in case #2 you didn't have to consider your previous purchases, if you could just type in the product into your phone and be told (without doubt) that the product is $10 cheaper at a store across the street from your normal store most people would take that; it's $10 that would be saved by walking across the street, it would be stupid not to, right?

So now you have a situation where in case #2 any store that stocks an item (HP Printer, for example) is required to stock it at the lowest price because if they don't and a competitor is within 2 blocks (the "distance of $10") people will just go there instead. So now where is the value to the retailer? They enable themselves to be pitted against their competitors, thus requiring they lower their margins and inevitably lose out to bigger stores that can work with lower margins.

In example #3 the same situation occurs, you enter a store and locate the item that you want, enter it into your phone and get told exactly where it can be acquired and at what price; if the store that has it cheapest is 2 blocks away and the price difference is $15 why not go over to the other store and save the $15? That store just lost a sale because of the system.

Almost everyone that I know (I'm not from a rich background) would absolutely walk over the street to save $15, that's a non-neglible amount of money to quite a large portion of consumers. Sure if every other store has the item cheaper but it's only $0.25 difference people probably aren't going to go to another store, but then it becomes a race to the bottom. Wonderful for the consumers, awful for the retailer.

What incentive is there for a retailer to force themselves to reduce their own margins? Currently purchasing an item in a retail store is a gamble on whether or not you'll pay the lowest price (unless you spend time researching every stores pricing), stores make money because of this. Currently it's a matter of taking a consumer, showing them a product and convincing them to purchase, if this system existed it would have an extra step: convince them to purchase at that particular store.

Also note that your store in case #3 doesn't lose the sale from their use of the app; I can see their price because I'm standing in the store, so they lose the sale whether or not they're using the app. Using the app doesn't gain them anything, so they might not use it -- but it does gain their competitor a sale, so the competitor definitely should use it.

And of course a lot of what I buy costs little enough that comparison shopping is pointless. It's $3 at Wal-Mart and $4 in the store right next to my house? The closer store might gain a sale by telling me they exist and they have the thing I want (whether or not Wal-Mart is using this app, the dollar savings isn't making the difference). So the retailer again has the chance to gain value here.

The net result here is that there is incentive for retailers, at least in some markets, to use such a system. They've already lost all the sales you worry this will make them lose, but this provides some opportunity for them to make back some sales in other circumstances. So it's a net win.

Of course, it may not be enough of a net win to make it worth the effort for either the store or me as a consumer to use. Execution matters an awful lot. But it's not unreasonable that, done right, it could provide a lot of value to customers and retailers alike.

Again, maybe this is a difference between America and the UK, I've never seen a retail store compete with an online store in price, the value in retail is instant purchase and no shipping cost. If you're already comparison shopping you're not the average customer.

> Also note that your store in case #3 doesn't lose the sale from their use of the app; I can see their price because I'm standing in the store, so they lose the sale whether or not they're using the app. Using the app doesn't gain them anything, so they might not use it -- but it does gain their competitor a sale, so the competitor definitely should use it.

I think I explained it poorly. My example #3 is if you walk into a store and see an item is $15, if you then think "it's probably at cheapest going to be $10 anywhere else, it's not worth walking to the 4 other shops that probably stock this item to find out, as 1 hour of my time is worth more to me than a $5 saving" that store retains the sale; if you pull out your phone and it says "it's $10 across the street" you're going to go that new shop. Therefore a sale is lost: stores that offer the lowest price win (to a point, $0.25 difference won't matter to most consumers)

> And of course a lot of what I buy costs little enough that comparison shopping is pointless. It's $3 at Wal-Mart and $4 in the store right next to my house? The closer store might gain a sale by telling me they exist and they have the thing I want (whether or not Wal-Mart is using this app, the dollar savings isn't making the difference). So the retailer again has the chance to gain value here.

So that there is marketing; a store exists and there are potential customers that don't know it exists. Surely the solution to that problem is proper advertising? In your example what if there is 2 grocery stores right next to your house; if both use the app then you go to the cheapest. The only way the app would be valuable in that situation is if the shop was far enough out of the way from cheaper shops that the time investment wasn't worth it to go to the other shops.

> The net result here is that there is incentive for retailers, at least in some markets, to use such a system. They've already lost all the sales you worry this will make them lose, but this provides some opportunity for them to make back some sales in other circumstances. So it's a net win.

I'm not sure what you mean. If you go in to a shop to buy a $15 item and you know that there are 4 other shops that stock it and MAYBE one of them will MAYBE stock it for $5 cheaper do you go to each of the 4 other shops to find it MAYBE cheaper? No, nobody does that, it's insane. Now if you could pull out your phone and be told "Shop x has it for $10" you KNOW you're getting a $5 saving and the other shop is across the street. You'd be stupid not to go and get it from the other place. This means that the only shops that win are shops that price it the lowest, or shops that are in an isolate environment (say a small town) with no competition; but then the people would never be using the app because they would know where everything is.

> Of course, it may not be enough of a net win to make it worth the effort for either the store or me as a consumer to use. Execution matters an awful lot. But it's not unreasonable that, done right, it could provide a lot of value to customers and retailers alike.

Customers, absolutely, this would be incredibly valuable to customers, but I have yet to see a situation posted that makes it valuable enough to retailers that they could risk the downsides. If you're the cheapest store, great, extra custom, but if you can't afford the margins that others can? Then your business won't last, whereas currently a store can exist with higher priced items because of people have a "favourite" shop because of expected quality of pricing and experience.

You're also considering the value proposition symmetrically, when you should be considering it asymmetrically. That is, you're thinking "the store that sells this for $15 wouldn't use this app, because then the store selling it for $10 would steal all their business." That's a crappy value proposition for the $15 store, but a great one for the $10 store. Some stores might not use it, but those with better prices or better selections would basically consider it free advertizing.

Also, I'm pretty sure you're wrong about retailers not being able to compete if their prices are higher, and about this sort of app destroying those businesses. We already have this scenario with grocery stores, where you can compare them just by reading the paper (or the online ads), and yet certain more costly stores still survive. Maybe it's location/convenience, maybe it's unique selection, maybe it's customer service or return policies, or maybe it's that cute girl ringing up your groceries.

I think, ultimately, you're conceiving of this app as "how do I get the best price on X within a Y block radius?", whereas I'm conceiving of it as "can I get X from anywhere at all within a Y block radius?" and only secondarily "can I save money on X?" Phrased my way, there's an obvious value proposition for retailers.

- there are many items people buy on price and are willing to order online. Such items will gradually become unavailable in stores whether or not this idea is ever implemented.

- there are also many items that people want immediately, and are not well suited for online ordering. This convenience makes them well suited to these local search capabilities, and this characteristic may overcome a good part of the resistance to share data.

This distinction is crucial. It may not overcome the psychological resistance you mention, but it isn't obvious how serious that is or whether it can be overcome by system design. For example, you point out a key feature of this system which is the need for limited query capabilities and no downloading (cue debate on how possible that is).

But you miss the real problem with the idea. System integration difficulties will prevent the system from achieving critical mass and broad coverage. It will be unreasonably painful for stores to join the system for extremely mundane reasons like file formats and the difficulty of mapping proprietary taxonomies. Offline retailers just won't have data as ready to integrate as online.

Not impossible, but the sort of unrecognized under appreciated real challenge of the system.

I don't think that would be impossible. Unlikely maybe, but if the Groupon approach was taken (huge sales teams) it could work.

The hardest part of this idea is not getting stores to use it[1], it's proving that the product has enough value to stores for them to put work into it. Look at Groupon, places are falling over themselves to get involved (or were) to their own detriment (see the stories of people selling $20k of product for $1k) and with the rise of the internet high street shops are having problems. A place in my hometown that had been around for 30 years shut down earlier in the year because their business was being taken by online alternatives; they would have jumped at the chance to take anything that would have improved the businesses prospects no matter the work involved. It's not the question of "should we have 100k profit this year of 101k?" it's "should we break even this year or shut down?"

If the product actually provided value to the stores (which I think it won't, it would harm them) then getting stores involved wouldn't be hard. Again, maybe it's England specific but a lot of high street stores here are losing business fast and I doubt any of them would be stupid enough to ignore an opportunity to increase their business, regardless of the work involved, I think that the OPs idea is the problem. Stores aren't big giant corporate machines with hundreds of different parts, if a system had a good sales team and a good product I don't believe it would be as hard as you state.

[1] Technically the hard part is getting stores to use it, yes, but that's a byproduct of showing there is enough value. If there is enough value I believe getting stores to switch to the system would not be as difficult as building a valuable product.

The biggest problem, as the parent said, is that brick and mortar stores would be actively hostile to this idea.

I'm not saying that there are enough categories of items that are not well suited for mail order, and have a high degree of value based locality. But this is the central question for such a product.

Retailers whose businesses are protected by locality won't be as reluctant as you imagine. Note that these will be the only successful local retailers over time anyway.

These are also precisely the businesses that currently have the loosest idea of their actual inventory and would incur the most changes to move to the kind of inventory tracking necessary for this to work.

They are also frequently the categories of items that consumers would comparison shop the least. Few people care about going to a few corner groceries to get the right brand of milk. They all carry mostly the same group of products and anything were consumers care about choice (coke/pepsi) they already carry all the options for the same price as everyone else.

I don't necessarily think that it completely ruins the idea though—bigger brands wouldn't suffer from the same problem and if you could get more than a few in, the momentum would start to build.

To be honest though, this post was less about the idea and more about reflecting on thought of committing to a big idea at a young age. It's cool to see all these people giving real, and great, feedback on the idea, but I think that's kind of overlooking the idea. As many have said, there will always be huge ideas, and all ideas will always have problems—maybe that's why I don't yet feel comfortable committing a huge chunk of my life to just one.

As the OP, I might get torn up for writing this, but I thought it was worth sharing.

Here is what I would do (and yeah I've run my own business for many years, always easier said than done.)

#1 Build this produce but make it specific to a specific retailer or chain.

#2 For #1 to happen, the system needs to be pretty much "free to try" and seamless for the retailer. Think about that one real hard.

#3 Build a checkout system where customers walk in to the store and walk out with the product. All sales happen electronically, payments through the application.

#4 Now instead of "Walgreens App", "CVS App", etc, you consolidate the data in to one system. This sounds far fetched, but is very much the business model Google has employed. Tens of billions of dollars of customers flow through Google's platform. Google's method of consolidation include search algorithm "updates", opaque Adwords "quality score", moving Google Shopping from free to paid, and so on.

If no one manages to accomplish #4, retailers will start doing it internally. To some limited degree, it is already being done.

Accomplishing all of this could take a while. Whats certain is the US has a vast overcapacity in retail, and people waste too much time wandering through stores trying to find crap (and then there is the whole driving to stores thing for the rest of the non-urban areas.)

Why so? because they are doing the same thing, more or less. the biggest advantage amazon has is logistics and range. but sometimes locality matters. I think there will be enough place for both approaches.

But this idea will only work if you work out two things: sales for market penetration and to gain acceptance by local stores and logistics. Both issues aren't trivial but the idea certainly has potential, HUGE potential. In more than one way. I can imagine that as "your social and local amazon alternative". And the main benefit smaller stores have is a means to ultimately counter amazon in some way or the other. But again, convincing these stores, very hard, logistics, very hard. And that's exactly the reason why the potential is that big.

not saying the core of what you say is wrong, but it's difficult to apply in many cases these days.

I agree with your main point that small stores might not like such a system but then to assume that all buyers will make a decision based solely on price is flawed.

What if you're standing outside the store and decide to check out a service that will price check for you across EVERY store; you type in the item and it says "this item is $90 at store y" and you notice store y is just 2 doors away. What do you do, do you shop at your regular store or do you shop at the new one? The majority of people will go with the new one, it's stupid not to walk an extra 10 feet to save $10, the new store might even be better!

Again, maybe England is different, but we have this sort of thing here for large chains, there is a site called mysupermarket.co.uk that will take your shopping list and tell you which supermarket is cheapest.

Why would a small store (the sort that aren't already engaged in this sort of thing) willingly signup to be pitched against their competitors in a race to the bottom? It's nonsensical. My mother shops at specific stores for specific goods because over the years of custom she has had a good experience with their pricing and service, she views the good experience she's had as justification for not shopping around, "they've always been good to me so spending time looking around at new shops to maybe save 2% isn't worth it" but if she could just type "umbrella" into a website and instantly be told which shop is the best for that item she'd no longer be loyal to that shop.

Retail isn't the hackernews world of SaaS, people don't choose to spend an extra 20% every time because "it's a good brand", "the founders are good people", they choose primarily based on price and service is a small part of it, a part most people will sacrifice to save 10%.

Sure, some customers will go to Walmart instead of a locally owned business, but how does the local business benefit from not being in the search at all?

As I explained in other comments, people currently shop based on expected value, they can't know for sure that shop x has the best pricing but they have been there before and got a good deal so they assume it will again provide them with a good deal.

If the only concern when purchasing is "which has the lowest cost?" this app would mean that EVERY user of the app can have that question answered, currently in the real world the question is "does the potential saving justify the time investment of visiting every shop and finding out their pricing"?

If there are 4 stores in the local area and you've previously bought a DVD player from store #2 for $100 and you want to buy another and you think $100 is around the best price you'll find you go to that store and purchase it; sure you didn't get the best price but was the POTENTIAL SAVING (which is entirely theoretical) worth the time investment to search out by visiting every store?

This app would create a race to the bottom, it would be worse than online for retailers because shops are quite close together, the only "cost" to the customer is the effort required to get to the cheapest store, in any mall or shopping district that's probably a very short walk. With online stores you can compete on shipping, next day vs. 7 days even though the item costs $5 more? I'll take next day, but $5 more to save me walking 20 yards? Not going to happen.

Local search would be great if you're the lowest cost retailer, otherwise it'd be a big problem.

I don't know where you've been living, but this is already here, and that's exactly how I (and millions of others) buy more expensive stuff.

But hey you know you'll always get some constructive criticism no matter the idea, and that's definitely worth something.

That's actually a pretty good discussion when we just stop being meta and debate it.