7. A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing executable instructions thereon, which, when executed by a processor, cause the processor to perform operations including: building 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; receiving a query from a specific mobile scanning device associated with a specific user, the query including a product identifier; identifying 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 generating 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.
13. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 7 , wherein a respective scan location association of a given historical product scan message corresponds to geo-location information from a respective mobile scanning device.