Pushing shopping behavioral change and mobile commerce forward may be driven by small, functional innovations that are highly personal. One such advance just came from a feature added to the CVS mobile app. Through a new "drug interaction checker" built into the app, consumers can now scan the UPC barcode on thousands of products and compare the product details to the patient's over-the-counter or prescription medications, which can be entered or imported.

While mobile scanning is still a distance from mass consumer usage, it hasn't stopped the proliferation of codes on packaging and signage. For QR code proponents, the good news is that most people at least know what they are. The bad news, of course, is that most people have never scanned one. Some new research in the Mobile Commerce Compendium shows that 91% know what a QR code is but 65% have never scanned one in-store. The eConsultancy study is based on a Toluna survey of 1,000 UK consumers looking at smartphone behaviors. It found that more than a third …