Editor’s Note: Today’s post is part of our Featured Requester series highlighting examples of how Mechanical Turk Requesters are utilizing our marketplace and the results they’re able to achieve. This post is from Jeff Sampson, founder and CEO of Upside Commerce.
Everyone loves a good deal....When advertising firm DDB asked Facebook fans why they “liked” a brand on the platform, 83% shared they were looking for “special deals and offers.” Two years later, the top 100 brands on Facebook have a combined total 525 million “fans”, indicating a rapid shift in the way consumers engage with their favorite brands. However, despite the growth of brands’ fan bases on social networks, marketers have limited tools to engage.
Upside Commerce provides a platform to connect consumers on social media sites to deals and coupons from the brands they love most. Our platform enables marketers to distribute coupons and deals via a mobile app to “fans” based on their interests. Users of the app are able to store these coupons on their phones and can easily redeem them at local retailers. For marketers, Upside Commerce provides real-time data to measure campaign performance, including conversions, shares, redemptions, locations and total revenue.
When we first launched the Upside mobile app, we lacked deal inventory. We feared that if users weren’t able to see deals from their favorite brands, their experience using the app would suffer. To address this problem, we considered developing a web scraper to crawl deals published online, but this approach took too much time and required that we divert our developers away from core product features.
Deals for fast moving consumer products are still primarily published in print - not surprising given that fulfillment for these products typically happens at offline retailers, such as grocery stores. We realized we needed a way to digitize thousands of paper coupons every week.
To accomplish this task, we decided to try Mechanical Turk. We scanned thousands of print coupons, embedded digital images of the deals into a Mechanical Turk HIT, instructed Workers to extract key data elements– things like the face value, brand, expiration, etc .
Below is a screenshot of the HIT below that illustrates how we designed the interface:

To ensure quality results, we only allowed access to Masters Workers [link to Masters post], and we had up to three Workers complete each task so that we could compare their answers. If the Workers’ inputs matched – we would add the deal to our database.
Our Results
Using Mechanical Turk we were able to digitize receipts in a fraction of the time at a significantly lower cost than other methods. Here are a few statistics that represent the results that we’ve been able to achieve:
- Greater than 99% accuracy with Master Workers;
- Each batch of 100 coupon images was transcribed in less than 15 minutes - in most cases less than 10 minutes; and
- Workers took an average of 33 seconds to complete each HIT.
Mechanical Turk provides us with the flexibility we need to be nimble and build the product inventory required for our launch. As we move forward, we plan to continue to leverage Mechanical Turk to expand our coupon inventory globally, as well as create new digital content (through Worker sourced images) related to products and brands.
Learnmore about the Upside Commerce and their mobile app, Upside, on their website.