Here’s a quick peak of the barcode scanning market through the lens of ScanBuy, a Motorola-backed company that has developed barcode scanning applications for smartphones and conducts interactive advertising campaigns for numerous brands and publishers. According to an inaugural report by the New York-based company, the number of scans being conducted has jumped more than 700 percent since January and said in July more scans were conducted in a single month than all of 2009 combined.
While this one provider can’t represent what’s going on across the whole industry, it’s worth looking at the performance of its ScanLife applications in the market as one benchmark of consumers’ interest in scanning barcodes. The data represents traffic from both two-dimensional (2D) barcodes and UPC barcodes from June to Sept. 15, 2010. (Report PDF.)
Here’s some additional highlights from the report:
— 45 percent of the scans are occurring on Android, however, Android tends to over-index because the ScanLife is preloaded on some devices and is supporting by carriers like Verizon. Therefore, iPhone and BlackBerry performs less strongly.
— Strangely enough, the top two most popular categories for scanning are every day products that one would find in their kitchen or bathroom.
— More surprisingly, these people are actually purchasing these items through the mobile device. Sanbuy can track what people are buying because their system is connected to affiliate programs on a number of online retailers from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) to Wal-Mart.
–The top three categories that are generating sales on the phone are: Health & Beauty, Books and Electronics.

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