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Black Friday: There’s an app for that

By
Lauren Tousignant
Published Nov. 27, 2013, 12:29 p.m. ET

Deal aggregator and price comparison apps are trying to position themselves as the monkey in the middle of your biggest shopping day of the year: Black Friday.

Apps like Fat Wallet’s Black Friday, TGI Black Friday, and the just launched app by Slickdeals: Black Friday App, are several that are positioning themselves as go-to shopping services for THE shopping weekend.

But are the apps really helpful — or will you just spend hours on your smart device monkeying around?

“In many cases, you have to go do product research yourself — it’s not a straight forward journey between here and Black Friday when you look at those Doorbusters,” says Allen Weiner, research vice president at Gartner.

Despite the fact that fewer reported they were planning to shop over Black Friday weekend — 140 million this year, compared with 147 million in 2012 — the potential audience of Black Friday app users is nonetheless immense. According to the National Retail Federation’s holiday spending survey, 97 million shoppers plan to shop on Black Friday, or 69.1 percent.

It’s no surprise that leading up to Black Friday, the practice of showrooming is turned on its head on Black Friday. Instead, deal-hungry shoppers digitally scour for prices and gift ideas in order to shape their off-line purchases, referred to as “webrooming.”

But Weiner notes that showrooming — or webrooming as the case might be this time of year –must be relatively effortless for it to really work. Ideally for it do so, this might require not only ease of navigation or a robust price comparison feature, but also, a timely updating of retail deals.

Slickdeals, a coupons, deals and discount site, launched its free Black Friday App on iOS and Android, relies on its community of 1.6 million registered members to populate online and offline retail deals for the holidays, as they do for the website.

According to CEO Josh Meyers, “Rather than flipping through a hundred ad scans and thousands of deals, Slickdeals’ voting system lets users crowdsource the best of the best deals in real-time.”

Fat Wallet, a traditional deals site has updated its popular Black Friday App, available on Android and iOS. The app “lets you shop the way you want,” says Brent Shelton, a spokesperson for the company. Shoppers can sort by product, store, or check out PDFs of ads from retailers. The app, updated from last year’s, now lets you shop “early deals,” giving you a preview of what will be for sale soon. Additionally, there is now a Fat Wallet check-out option that allows for a two-click in-app purchase of items from a select number of retailers, about 100 that it has partnered with.

Though the userface is intuitive, it still might prove overwhelming for some, leaving too much up to the consumer given the amount of offers out there during this time period, and the number of products they might be sifting through.

As of Wednesday, the app is the number one app in the Lifestyle category in the iTunes app store. Other Black Friday-related among the top fifteen include: Black Friday 2013 Ads App – BlackFriday.fm and Black Friday by BradsDeals.

It’s hard to know how swiftly retail offers will be updated in these dedicated apps. Fat Wallet learns of “leaks” from retailers and converts them into a digital format for FatWallet.com, which then feeds the app. Similarly, TGI Black Friday, which counts three million app downloads in the US, also must wait until retailers make sale information available.

PriceGrabber, a leading online shopping service, which has its own app that allows consumers to research products on-the-go, as well as utilize a barcode scanner in-stores, says they update “about hourly.” According to president Jeff Goldstein, “It’s complicated and hard..and for some deals, its closer to real time and for others, there’s a bit of a lag.”

Many retailers are expected to take to social media to announce price drops — with the immediacy of social media, “breaking news” of price drops isn’t the primary resource factor for these apps.
“I think their [retailers] biggest push is going to be through two of the most popular apps: Twitter and Facebook,” says Weiner.

Like sifting through deals, and comparing prices during the holiday shopping period, finding footing in the saturated app and retail market is especially challenging for these time-pegged apps.

“There’s a huge findability challenge with apps – even retailers that have apps struggle with getting critical mass and downloads,” notes Sucharita Mulpuru-Kodali, retail analyst at Forrester Research.

As such, it can be hard for seasonal apps to compete with individual retailer apps that might prove particularly useful during the holiday season, like Amazon’s Price Check app. According to Google’s 2013 Holday Shopper Intentions survey, three out of four consumers report that online research will help determine what they buy this holiday season.