Ever saw something you really liked? A colleague’s laptop? A friend’s bag? A movie star’s sunglasses or even a cool looking plant? What were the questions that came to your mind?
- What is it?
- Where can I get it?
- How much does it cost?
- Tell me more about it.
- I want to buy it!
What is all of this information were available to you just by clicking a picture of the product? Sounds like something out of James Bond film, doesn’t it? Now what if I told you that there’s an app that lets you do this? Would you rather be the clueless guy with a ton of questions or your own version of Daniel Craig?
While the future of the web is becoming visual with websites like Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr, more people are shifting to online shopping rather than offline. Imagine a situation where you’re trying to find an item you saw days ago. Feeding Google with some random keywords about the product won’t fetch you any meaningful result, alternatively you ask your friends or post on some forums asking more information about the product. Even after doing all these, the solutions aren’t reliable most of the times, left you wasting your precious time. But armed with a smartphone, all you have to do is snap a photo and there’s an app which will try to identify the item and find information on it.
ScanIt as they call it is an app that lets users find their favorite items with just a snap. The user just needs to snap and upload a picture of the item, be it a designer dress seen in a magazine or a swatch of fabric and click on search.
Once the user uploads the snap, the app searches an exact match in its database and suggests a range of related products. Not only does it show the product, it also shows the online stores where the item can be bought. It also has the feature called “Store Locator”, to show the nearest offline store where the item is available. It’s designed to be faster and easier than a search engine.
Through the Store Locator feature, ScanIt shows the retail stores where the product the user searched may be available, including information like,
- Store Name
- Store Address and Phone Number
- Store Timings
- Company Website
- Discounts/Offers going on in the store
- Pictures of Similar Products in Stock
Testing out the app, I snapped a picture of a pair of shoes to be presented with the exact match items from different online as well as offline stores.
On the other hand, increasing customer reach has always been a target for all companies’ marketing campaigns. Companies are continuously looking for innovative ways to increase the number of potential customers they have especially by reaching them at the right place and the right time, ScanIt’s store locator solves that.
This helps the retailers generate very strong brand recall for their stores as the retailers have the advantage of reaching out to potential customers at their craving point, which is the exact time when they’re interested in products that the retailers sell.
ScanIt was founded by Vishrut Jhawar, an Undergrad from Boston University School of Management in Finance and a first-time entrepreneur. Vishrut is also an avid boxer which helps him to take decisions in high-pressure situations.
Talking about how the idea of ScanIt was seeded, Vishrut shares, “to be very honest, the entire concept and idea came to me in a matter of hours and there it was, set in stone in my mind. This was further validated when I was trying to help my grandmother use her iPhone to browse the internet and I found that she would be much better off if she could take a picture of anything and find out more about it, which is when I knew that Scan It was the app of the future that I had to build, right now.”
ScanIt is free and available both on Android & iOS. It is currently in the early revenues stage with about 50,000 active users on the App. As a first mover advantage, Vishrut plans to make ScanIt India’s largest image recognition solutions provider, making shopping, learning and gaining accurate information easier than ever.
Download Scan It from Play Store (Android) & App Store (iOS)
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