Scotty's Home Market pioneered the concept of portable home shopping devices and even eight years later remains the most successful example of its consumer potential with it's Scottyscan program in August of 1999.

The objective of the program was to address some hurdles to consumer adoption of the Scotty's home delivery service, primarily reduce the effort required for customers to compile their weekly shopping list and send that to Scotty's. The average grocery shopping trip is not anything like shopping for books or CDs, so where Web applications seem to work for very for services like Amazon.com, loading up 50 line items in a shopping cart on-line every week is quite time consuming, especially in 1999 when the vast majority of on-line customers were connecting via 56 Kbps dial-up.

If only customers could quickly add items to their list by scanning the UPCs of items in their home or adding items from their list of previously purchased stuff. Aha.

Scottyscan was comprised of Symbol's SPT-1500 (basically a Palm III with an integrated Symbol barcode scanner), HighPoint Systems' portable shopping software and Web-based HotSync service, and Scotty's web shopping application and business and marketing program.

It worked. Wildly so.

Until I get more time to provide a more detailed record of the Scottyscan program, a press release from HighPoint Systems, the provider of the technology platform, provides a pretty good summary.

"Smart" Appliance Powered by HighPoint May Hold Key to Widespread Adoption of Home Grocery Shopping
HighPoint Systems | Cambridge, MA-December 7, 1999