Best Buy partners with IFTTT to offer store alerts

As retailers and consumers continue to gear up for the start of the holiday shopping season, a few companies are trying to provide a tech twist to help avoid the usual craziness of post-Thanksgiving shopping.

As past Black Friday shoppers are well aware, one of the biggest issues for consumers on the unofficial shopping "holiday" is dealing with the mad-rush to get the latest gadget or "doorbuster" deal, a problem the only seems to be growing more complicated as Black Friday deals begin earlier and move into Thanksgiving day.

To help combat this problem, IFTTT, the three-year-old company that combines different services to allow them to interact with one another, has partnered with Best Buy to offer alerts on when products like Motorola's Moto 360 smartwatch will be available, and in stock, in local stores.

To set up the service, users must download the IFTTT app from the iOS App Store or Google Play Store (or head to the IFTTT website), create or log-in with their IFTTT account and subscribe to this Best Buy notification which activates the Best Buy channel. You can then set up a notification to alert you when a Best Buy near you, within a 25-mile radius, has a Moto 360 in stock.

The alerts can be through any of IFTTT's various methods that include sending a text message, email or push notification to your phone. You can also customize which variant of the Moto 360 you would want to be notified about (Motorola offers the watch it either Black Leather, Stone Leather or Stainless Steel). As soon as Best Buy updates their inventory in one of the nearby stores, you'll get a notification letting you know that the device is in stock.

While the feature this Black Friday is limited solely to Best Buy and Motorola's smartwatch, which itself will only work with Android devices, it's not hard to envision the service being rolled out to other retailers for other products, according to Linden Tibbets, who created IFTTT alongside his brother Alex. "There's no reason why not," said Tibbets, "It's Best Buy who gets to make this decision. Just like Best Buy can decide what they want to communicate in the iOS app or in their Android app, they get to define what types of triggers or recipes they want to enable in our system."

The Best Buy "recipe" is part of growing "holiday collection" created by IFTTT for the upcoming shopping season. Others include saving Etsy favorites to Evernote, receiving shipping changes through a text message or getting an Android notification from Best Buy for a price change to the PlayStation 4.

As for future holiday seasons, Tibbets can see the feature becoming a staple for how we approach holiday shopping. "There's no reason that different retailers wouldn't be able to make this same type of trigger happen as well for different products or different deals."

Follow Eli Blumenthal on Twitter @eliblumenthal