1. A computer system comprising: a processor; a memory device holding an instruction set executable on the processor to cause the computer system to perform operations comprising: a scan event handler, implemented by one or more processors, configured to build a scan event model from historical product scan messages previously received from a plurality of mobile scanning devices associated with a plurality of users, each of the historical product scan messages having a product association and a scan location association; and a recommendation engine, implemented by the one or more processors, configured to: receive a query from a specific mobile scanning device associated with a specific user, the query including a product identifier; identify a subset of the historical scan messages, wherein each historical scan message in the subset is associated with a product definition that matches the received product identifier; and generate a recommendation for the specific user based on a merchant identified by a plurality of different retail locations represented in the subset of historical scan messages.