Flyers on your phone: reebee aims to cut costs and waste for Black Friday shoppers and retailers

Digital flyer app to help you on Black Friday Watch: A Canadian company has come up with a way to deal with paper waste and save you money at the same time. Alesia Fieldberg has more.

CALGARY -- Seeking deals can mean sifting through a lot of flyers, so a Canadian company has created an app to make it quicker and easier to find the best prices, all while creating less waste.

It's called reebee and it's a free platform where people can browse digital flyers from more than 100 Canadian stores at once, then save offers to a personalized shopping list.

“It’s so fast and quick,” said Sayeh Moayerian who uses reebee.

“I don’t need to go page by page to look for a specific thing. All of them I compare at once.”

Viktor Yakovlev, reebee's sales and marketing rep, said the average app user makes significant savings each year.

”Almost $4,000 on groceries alone and across other categories; electronics, home improvements; the savings are even more," Yakovlev said.

Retailers who pay to be part of the service can reach people who might not otherwise see the flyers and can also cut costs on printed flyers.

“We’ve been able to reduce our paper waste, our paper, by 20 per cent at The Brick here,” said Angena Kumar, Prairies South regional manager.

The app aims to encourage more people to opt out of the paper flyers. Reebee staff say the amount created digitally during this holiday season alone would amount to a huge reduction in waste.

“We’re expecting to see over 80 million flyers read. If we’re able to reduce 80 million flyers printed that would be actually massive," Yakovlev said.

Retailers also get useful digital information on when and how their customers are shopping.

Black Friday draws a lot of traffic to the app.

“We’re seeing 20 per cent increase in flyer reads, almost a 25 per cent increase in items going into users’ shopping list,” said Yakovlev.

The Ontario-based company estimates it has more than five million users.