Even though every single business around us seems to be getting hit one way or another from the economic crunch (and this is bad!), there are still new services that seem to be arising from the needs of this harder and tighter market.

Consumers are becoming more and more concerned about where and how they spend their money, and the mobile service I am blogging about today, seems to have come to help cover this need. This SMS service allows UK consumers to text the brand, model no, and postal code/town where they are currently located, in order to get back an SMS with the prices from all local registered shops, including the web price for each one. From the news article:

The service is free for retailers to sign up to, and provides both small independent retailers and larger electrical retail chains with a way of monitoring their local market, reaching new audiences and ensuring their prices remain as competitive as possible.
To use the service, shoppers text the word PRICE, plus the make and model of the item they want, along with a location, to 60706. Within 60 seconds, they will receive an SMS response, containing two local stores with the cheapest retail prices, plus the best web price. Shoppers pay 35p plus standard network charges for successful search results.
“More than ever, in the current economic climate, shoppers are looking for bargains and retailers are looking for fresh ways to promote their best prices and get customers in store,” says GotYourPriceCheck Founder, Harmeet Baxi. “Retailers who sign up to GotYourPriceCheck will immediately begin to reap the benefits, and with many of their closest competitors coming on board, they can’t afford to miss out.”

Of course the service depends largely on the participation of retailers. Consumers can't have a complete picture of the market (or the high-street) if they can't get all the prices from all the shops. And this of course is difficult in practice, as not all shops are equipped with the technology to participate in such a scheme. However smaller shops might often have deals or offers on, which means they are the cheapest. The difficulty is getting people to trust the mobile service when not everyone is participating, but on the other, hand smaller shops already have a difficulty in keeping up with larger brands and retail chains.

I particularly like this SMS service because it means people can spend less time walking around from shop to shop looking for the best deal on the product they have decided to buy, and more time sitting for coffee with friends (the 'national sport' for greeks), or go to the cinema, or spend more time for entertainment in general.

I would like a couple of obvious, I guess, improvements to the service, such as the service detecting my location automatically, and offering the results ordered by approximate distance. Also, though SMS is pretty limiting regarding this respect, related products are another service I would like, and also categories of products, so that I could check which stores have an offer on dvd-recorders for instance, rather than specific models of specific brands.

EIther way, it seems such a service will be probably be a while before it comes to Greece (most stores here are still struggling with maintaining an online presence), but I hope it doesn't take too long!