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Frucall.com expands shopping
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A new company lets users comparison shop online without a computer. Frucall.com, based in Irvine, Calif., allows customers to call a toll-free number using their cell phone from the sales fl oor of a retail business like Circuit City or Barnes & Noble bookstore to obtain information from online portals like Yahoo!, eBay, and Amazon.
Using the Universal Product Code, or UPC, from a product’s package, shoppers can get price comparisons and consumer reviews.
Customers are then given the option of making the purchase over the phone or saving his or her search results to view over the Frucall Web site at a later time.
The service, which launched in January, has grown solely by word of mouth, CEO Behzad Nadji said. Its customer base is around 5,000.
“We haven’t even advertised,” he said. “(It’s) catching on pretty fast.”
Although the privatelyheld company isn’t profi table, Nadji has ambitious plans. The former AT&T senior vice president who joined Frucall — the name combines frugal and call — in September said he expects to be profi table and increase the customer base by one million users by the end of 2007.
Stephen Brown, a professor who focuses on the marketing of services at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business, said if Frucall succeeds and other companies begin offering similar services to empower consumers with more information on products, it could completely change the relationship between consumers, retailers and manufacturers.
He said retailers and manufacturers could both be forced to compete harder by lowering prices, improving quality, and cranking up services by offering perks like free delivery for big-ticket items.
“I think it’s got nothing but benefits for the consumer,” he said.
Dave Hogan, a retail industry expert with the Washington-based National Retail Federation, agreed.
He compared Frucall with online price comparison services like airline ticket discounters like Orbitz.com or Priceline.com, and said if the popularity of those Web sites are any indication, Frucall may
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