Decide.com has been on a roll in recent weeks, unveiling a new daily deal service, hiring top talent such as social media expert Shauna Causey and introducing a new service that tells shoppers the best time to buy home appliances.
Now, the Seattle startup — co-founded by University of Washington computer scientist Oren Etzioni and bankrolled by Seattle venture capital firms Madrona Venture Group and Maveron — is expanding its lineup of mobile offerings with a new iPad app that’s designed to help shoppers discover the best prices on phones, tablets, cameras, refrigerators and more than 500,000 other products.
And yes, it’s not lost on us, that you can also use the new iPad app to check whether you should buy a new iPad.
The iPad app is significant since 40 percent of the company’s traffic now comes via mobile devices, kind of a no-brainer since shoppers are using the apps while browsing products in physical retail stores to determine whether they should buy or wait. That’s not unlike Zillow, which yesterday announced that more homes are now viewed on mobile devices than on the company’s Web site.
Decide.com CEO Mike Fridgen discussed the importance of mobile on the GeekWire podcast last month.
“If you are at Best Buy and you are staring at a wall of TVs and confused about which product to buy, you can easily scan those QR codes, and instantly know: ‘Should I buy, or should I wait?”
Update: TechCrunch notes that Decide.com is planning to expand into cars and other household items, something we reported on the GeekWire podcast last month. Here’s what Fridgen said:
“Our vision for Decide.com is to take it across all major categories in shopping, including cars and tools and hardware and home & garden. You go on and on. That’s our broad vision for Decide. Cars is one of the most asked for categories, and you can even see the model lineage piece with some of the information about body styles and the next evolution of those things could really help people to decide for the next version or the next year or make a purchase today. Those are things we are absolutely looking at in the future.”
