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Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

Here is an app idea:

Users use a smartphone app to zap the price labels on shelves in shops.

The app can provide basic price history and comparison prices etc.

Furthermore, users could organise into little community groups. The app is tracking what is a good price and what is a good shelf life etc and what is in demand and what is on specific members shopping lists etc and tells the zapper how many to buy for a common stockroom.

Of course the supermarkets will not like people wandering about their shop with an app, but they have a pretty ugly PR problem telling people they aren't allowed to use the app in their store etc?

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I’ve got a site with the price history aspect for Canadian groceries (http://grocerytracker.ca/), but the community groups/public lists idea is interesting. I definitely feel like there is a lot of potential in this space.

Monetization? I explored that idea before, but soon discovered it's hard to charge customers already looking to save money. Yet unfortunately, what's easier and more lucrative is selling that same data to the retailers to keep your lights on.

Perhaps this could be an unmonetized activist-programmed app.

Or, with big VC backing, in some markets you could set up a mail-out retailer that is just undercutting shelf prices. You have the data on who is buying what and how much they are paying, and you are providing the organisational glue for community group buying and stockrooms, so you could be getting into being a virtual supermarket without renting any retail space?

Explored that idea also.

The fact is that the majority of big brand retailers do not make most of their revenue from selling products, but from selling shelf space. Margins on products are often very low, in the 2-5% ranges. But selling a single 1 meter length shelf space would generate thousands of dollars in revenue annually. That's not something you can charge for easily for an online store.

The virtual supermarket doesn't have to stock everything. It can be very selective in what it identifies as something it can economically provide etc. It can be an esoteric mix of things it happens to have high enough margins on.

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