The Good
- Free
The Bad
- Disorganized
- Too many eBay listings
- Few features
Shopping.com is a very simple free app designed to compare prices for a variety of consumer products. I was willing to forgive the lack of many nice-to-have features, but the app isn’t very good at price comparisons either, which is pretty unforgivable.
Disorganized Search Results
There is not a lot going on with the Shopping.com app, so it is very easy to start using. If you know how to use Google, you’ll have no trouble figuring out this app. Simply enter the product name into the search field and the app will (hopefully) display what you’re looking for with a bunch of prices. There’s also a section where you can view your saved or emailed products, recent searches, and last-viewed products. Since the Shopping.com app doesn’t have many features, it needs to be really good at price comparisons. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
The app does an okay job of comparing prices, but be prepared for some frustrations. A search for the iPod touch brought up 52 results with no apparent organization. The latest version was mixed in with the first- and third-generation touch, and there were some iPod nanos thrown in there for good measure.
Fortunately, there is a ‘narrow results’ field that lets you sort the listings. This helps in some cases, but it is not a perfect fix. After telling the app that I just wanted to see the third-generation touch (there was no option for the fourth-generation model), it said there were no results. Are you kidding me? I just saw more than 10 listings for it before I tried to narrow my results. There is obviously has some sort of glitch because I did get it to work for some items but not others.
Few Features
Once you actually find the product you’re looking for, the experience gets better. The individual product pages are nicely laid out and you can quickly see prices at different stores. There are a ton of eBay listings, however, which seems like overkill. One or two eBay listings is probably enough -- I don’t need to see all 30 of them.
There is also a ‘most popular’ section that lists the most popular products in a variety of different categories, including televisions, video games, and laptops. I guess this could help someone narrow down his or her choices, but I didn’t find it particularly helpful. There’s no apparent organization to the listings, and the product names aren’t standardized, which makes it difficult to compare products.
After testing out full-featured iPhone shopping apps like Amazon Mobile and GoodGuide, the Shopping.com app feels like a letdown. There’s no barcode scanner, for one, which would be a good addition (the developers say that feature is “coming soon”). And unlike Amazon Mobile, which has a neat picture-matching feature, Shopping.com doesn’t have anything that sets it apart from other apps.
The Bottom Line
I’m sorry to say it, but the Shopping.com app doesn’t fulfill any of my shopping needs. It only focuses on one thing -- price comparisons -- and it doesn’t do it very well. The search results are disorganized and the individual results include way too many eBay listings for my liking. (Big eBay shoppers may love it, however.) Unfortunately, I just don’t see myself using the Shopping.com app the next time I need to compare prices. Overall rating: 1.5 stars out of 5.
What You’ll Need
The Shopping.com app works with the iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. It requires iPhone OS 3.1 or later.