Monday, February 25, 2008

Vermont's Barcle.com adds Wal-Mart to wireless price checks

By Christopher Calnan

Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has signed on as the latest in a growing list of retailers featured on a Vermont company's price-comparison website.

Stowe, Vt.-based Huron PM Inc. operates pricing website Barcle.com, which allows shoppers to comparison shop via a barcode number search from a cell phone or other digital handheld device. The idea is to attract shoppers with the convenience of one-stop price comparisons while they're out shopping, saving the time and energy it takes to research prices via several websites first and then head out to the stores.

The addition of Wal-Mart's pricing data brings the total number of retailers listed on Barcle.com to 950 since Huron PM president Ted Baltuch launched the company in November 2007. The website now provides prices to more than 20,000 brands and 15 million products, he said.

There's no charge to shoppers using Barcle.com. The company generates revenue via sales commissions from links Barcle provides to retail websites, as well as advertising. The website has tripled its traffic since launching and processes about 56,000 price queries per day, Baltuch said. In addition to informing consumers, he said, such mobile technology gives users a negotiating tool.

Competitors include Shopping.com and BizRate.com operated by Shopzilla Inc., but neither features a barcode application to ensure exact model-to-model comparisons, according to Baltuch.

The use of such online tools by consumers is still in its infancy, said Rob Garf, retail analyst for AMR Research Inc. in Boston. "But it's a question of when, not if, these things will take off," Garf said. "When they do, they'll spread like wildfire."

According to Jeffrey Grau, a senior analyst for New York-based eMarketer Inc., mobile versions of shopping comparison websites may encourage impulse buying by consumers because they enable users to quickly check prices.

Barcle, which includes real-time pricing information that is updated daily, matches a product's barcode to the retailer prices -- then provides links to their websites.

Baltuch developed the idea for Barcle (a name that combines the "bar" of barcode with "cle," the French word for key) while shopping at a toy store last Thanksgiving.