ShopSavvy has hired Matthew Weathers, former product lead at PayPal Mobile, as vice president of product. Mobile Commerce Daily got an exclusive interview with the executive.

Mr. Weathers will lead the development of ShopSavvy’s mobile commerce strategy, including QuickPay, which enables ShopSavvy users to purchase the products they scan without ever leaving the application. He was part of the founding team for PayPal Mobile. 

The executive led the mobile product team at PayPal Mobile for four years and built out the product suite for three business lines: P2P payments, eBay mobile checkout and mobile merchant services. 

Mobile Commerce Daily’s Giselle Tsirulnik interviewed Mr. Weathers. Here is what he had to say.

My mandate is twofold. 

First, I will continue building on our original brand promise to consumers – helping them become savvy about what they buy.  

Working with the team, I will keep evolving this experience so that consumers easily find the right product, get fantastic prices, and conveniently act on those deals through QuickPay, store credits, and other services. 

Also, we started as a bar code scanner, but because of our deep consumer engagement, we will be increasingly helping consumers to help each other. 

Second, this team has built an incredibly powerful local and online search platform, and we now have an ad platform on top of that. 

ShopSavvy cannot itself address the vast variety of shopping experiences that exist. 

We seek to syndicate this product search capability to any mobile or online company that provides product insights to consumers. 

These partners can leverage our technology and we will share in the advertising and commerce revenue.
 
What is the current state of mobile commerce?
The hardest part of mobile commerce is not the transaction, it’s the traffic. 

Brands like Amazon, eBay, Apple and PayPal are doing a fantastic job getting users more comfortable with buying on their phone, but mobile commerce is today largely limited to those players.  

This is largely because mobile users tend to migrate to known brands rather than searching the entire Web ecommerce landscape on their mobile browser. 

ShopSavvy is fortunate to have a large base of active consumers, and our mission is to bring traffic to all reliable online and offline retailers at the consumer’s decision point. 

The second hardest part of mobile commerce is making it easy. 

On Android and iPhone it’s still not easy enough to enter credit card information. 

Mobile conversion is hard if you don’t have an easy way for someone to securely store their information.

Our upcoming QuickPay service will simplify merchant checkout and let users securely store their information so it’s easy the next time. 

We will work with partners like Cardinal Commerce, PayPal and anyone who can remove commerce frictions to deliver this capability.
 
How will you be guiding the development of ShopSavvy as a mobile commerce app?
I am extremely excited about our mobile commerce plans. 

I spent a number of years at PayPal working on making mobile commerce simple for merchants and consumers.

I think the world is finally getting there, and ShopSavvy is in an excellent position to continue that trend. 

We will deliver consumer traffic to online and local merchants at the exact point where consumers are considering a purchase. 

We then make it easy for that consumer to make the purchase through QuickPay. 

Online merchants will get mobile revenue from consumers who find their products in our app (or our partner’s apps). 

Local retailers will get consumer foot traffic from offers delivered to consumers. 

We will target our QuickPay offering at reliable merchants with great prices. 

QuickPay will be rolled out across merchants through our partners or direct integrations.
  
Where do you see mobile commerce going in the next year or so?
It is always hard to predict, but in 2011, we will increasingly see consumers taking out their phone to make a purchase decision. 

More and more of those consumers will actually use the phone to make the purchase online or in the store. 

Certain retail categories will take off sooner – probably electronics – and certain merchants will be more innovative. 

In the 2011 holiday season, I believe we will see mobile-assisted shopping become a large consumer buying behavior that retailers will need to take seriously.
 
What is your recommendation for retailers in terms of the mobile commerce opportunity?
Retailers should spend 2011 learning about how they can best tap into mobile-assisted shopping. 

For many retail categories, it will eventually become a sizable form of consumer marketing. 

The retailers who invest time now to create an early lead will get a strategic advantage in their sectors.

How do you plan to help ShopSavvy extend its lead to the No. 1 app for shoppers?
We are so lucky to have engaged and enthusiastic users. 

We will extend our lead by continuing to listen to their needs, by finding innovative ways to help make them savvy shoppers, and by helping them to help one another.