If you're headed to your local big box store to shop for holiday gifts or anything else you need, don't leave your smartphone behind—with the right apps, you can check the products you're looking at in the store to see if you're getting the best price there, whether you should head to the store next door, or wait until you get home to shop online. Here are five of the best mobile apps for comparing prices while you shop, based on your nominations.
Earlier in the week, we asked you which apps you turn to when you're shopping to make sure you're getting a good deal. You responded, and now we're back to take a look at the top five.
Clearly one of your first stops if you want to know if a product is cheaper online than it is in your local store is Amazon. That's why the company built Amazon Price Check. Just scan an product's barcode, take a photo of it, speak the name of the product, or enter in its name to see if the same product is available at Amazon at the same or a better price. Amazon is obviously betting that you'll find a better price online and that you'll order right from your phone, but they're sweetening the pot with an extra 5% discount to people who use the app and then make a purchase. Amazon Price Check is US Only.
Google Shopper is a mobile portal to all of Google's shopping options, including Google's local offers, daily deals, and more importantly, product search and comparison shopping via Google Shopping. Simple scan the barcode of a product, speak its name aloud, or even scan the covers of books, magazines, and other media to search Google's database for the product. If the same product is available at one of Google's partner retailers, you'll see how much it costs, along with ratings and reviews, specs, and more. The best part of Google Shopper is that it combines prices from local retailers with online prices to make sure you get the best deal.
Before Google and Amazon got really deep into the mobile price comparison game, ShopSavvy was making lists of must-install apps for any mobile OS. ShopSavvy is still a great tool, and allows you to scan the barcode of a product to search for it online, see prices at other brick-and-mortar and online retailers, and even load up your ShopSavvy "wallet" with cash so you can quickly purchase directly through the app. ShopSavvy even includes estimated shipping prices from the retailers listed so you can deal in final prices, not base prices. Finally, the ShopSavvy app gives you a window to a large community of people using the app, rating products and retailers, and letting you know whether the item you're thinking about buying is any good before you buy.
RedLaser started life as a simple app to help you scan barcodes, and evolved into a remarkably robust utility that does more than just Google search what it decodes. These days, RedLaser lets you scan barcodes quickly to compare prices in brick-and-mortar stores and online, and research products. RedLaser's product scanning doesn't just tell you if a brick-and-mortar store has the same product at a lower price, it tells you if that store is near you, how far away it is, and whether the item is in stock. If you're shopping for electronics and video games, scanning the product will get you ratings and reviews (even of the video games), and if you're scanning books, you can see if the book is in a nearby library.
PriceGrabber, one of the web's most trusted names in comparison shopping, also has one of the more essential mobile shopping apps available. PriceGrabber's focus is on online merchants instead of brick-and-mortar stores, but it can definitely tell you if a product is available online for less than you're ready to pay in your local department store. The service has millions of products in its database and thosuands of online retailes, so if your primary concern is whether or not you can get a better bargain online, it's worth installing.
Now that you've seen the top five, it's time to put them to an all-out vote.
All of these apps are free, so there's technically nothing stopping you from installing them all instead of waiting for a winner, and seeing which one is the best for you. Some of them overlap, but they're all useful tools if you're looking to make sure you don't overspend when you're shopping online or in-store.
Did your favorite app not get enough nominations to make the cut? Do you have something to say in defense of one of the contenders? Let's hear it in the comments below.
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