New research into the mobile consumer buying habits of men and women reveals that, not only do men shop more via mobile devices than women, but they also make more use of barcode scanners.

As mobile devices become the most common way people get online, uSamp decided to conduct a survey of the mobile shopping habits of 1,100 men and woman, ages 18 – 75. The results may surprise many people in that it found men to be the bigger online mobile shoppers.

What was everyone buying?

• 27% of males purchase consumer electronics on mobile vs. 8% of females
• 23% of males purchase movie and event tickets on mobile vs. 11% of females
• 30% of males purchase digital content on mobile vs. 20% of females
• 13% of males purchase food and drinks on mobile vs. 8% of females
• 8% of males purchase office supplies on mobile vs. 4% of females

Another interesting result from the study was that 91% of the time men were scanning barcodes with their mobile purchase versus the 85% of women. The survey found that men and woman who scan barcodes with mobile devices are shopping at these types of stores:

• Electronic store: 27% male vs. 12% female
• Convenience store: 7% male vs. 3% female
• Health & Beauty Store: 6% female vs. 2% male

More info on the study can be found here.

Everything is moving more and more to mobile platforms and payment processing is no different. Taking the point-of-sale wherever it is needed can be easily done with the right tools for your Apple, Android, or Blackberry smartphones.

The ID Tech Shuttle is a magnetic stripe reader that communicates with mobile devices via the headphone jack.  The Shuttle utilizes ID Tech’s proven MagStripe reading technology, providing bi-directional card reading of up to two tracks of information and supports TDES and AES encryption using DUKPT Key Management.  The Shuttle is the only audio jack MSR with firmware upgradeability in the field and compatible with over 100 different phones and tablets which is critical to ensure device functionality with the widest variety of host devices in the market today. You can find a complete list of compatible devices here.

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Many retailers experience a slow part of the day which can be a difficult challenge to solve.  Sometimes the best answer is engaging your customers in new and creative ways.

South Korea’s largest retailer, E-mart, was seeing a a large dip in daily business from 12pm to 1pm and came up with a novel way to get customers into stores.  They created a shadow QR code that was only scannable between 12pm and 1pm when the sun was in a position to cast the correct shape shadow.  When people would see these shadow QR codes outdoors they could use their smartphone to read them.  Once scanned, they are lead to a ‘Sunny Sale’ homepage with special offers, coupons and a download for the Emart ecommerce app.  This simple yet clever campaign helped increase Emart’s sale by 25% during their once difficult lunchtime slump. The campaign was conceived and managed by Cheil Worldwide who were also responsible for the virtual grocery store in Hangangjin subway station in Seoul.

One of the reasons we haven’t seen an accurate barcode scanner for the iPhone is due to its lack of a decent lens with auto focus. Some developers have tried work arounds, like ScanLife, which went out of its way to create its own proprietary simple codes the iPhone lens could actually scan, but this app doesn’t work with the standard UPC and EAN we see on almost every product in our local stores, thus pretty useless.

Occipital, a startup based out of Boulder, CO., today has released RedLaser, a new iPhone app that can scan standard UPC barcodes simply with an iPhone camera.

Here’s what it does – let’s say you find a DVD you’re interested in checking out prices of, turn it around and on the back you’ll find the UPC bar code. Yes, the one your friendly cashier usually scans. Load up your RedLaser app, carefully frame up the bar code, and scan. RedLaser then sends that information to Google product search and sends back results right to your iPhone. Simple as that. You can then click through to see Amazon results.

Jeffrey Powers, Co-Founder of Occipital explained the product works with basically any name-brand item including electronics, games, hardware and office supplies. Groceries scan well but aren’t usually in the database at this point. RedLaser will soon have support for books. I tried it on several of my DVD’s and CD’s and got 100% accuracy.

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