These days, there is an app for just about anything. Reviewing restaurants, playing games, finding a date – there’s an app for that. While once a relatively small and unwieldy set of apps, the realm of price comparison apps how grown exponentially in recent years, leading to a plethora of Android, iOS, and Windows apps that can help you compare price on everything from screen doors to digital cameras.
No matter what product you want to buy, you can find an app that can help you compare prices; additionally, there are apps that allow you to compare features between similar products. Some of these product-comparison apps are very general, where you can search for thousands of different products at different stores. While others target very specific products, and give you in-depth knowledge about the differences between ostensibly similar products.
The apps that compare prices of the same product across different retailers can be indispensable for deal-conscious shoppers. These apps, such as BuyVia or ShopSavvy allow you to check the current prices of certain items at multiple online, and brick and mortar, retailers. Certainly it can be a bit of a waste of time and effort to see if toilet paper costs $1 less at the store across town, when it comes to big ticket items like televisions or computers, these apps can be incredibly useful.
Of course, there are some dangers with these kinds of global price comparison apps. One of the biggest ones it that of course, the app developers want to make money and many of them utilize mobile app advertising in order to monetize their apps. Normally, this isn’t a problem as the advertisements are for completely different sectors, such as banks or TV shows. But the danger remains that the app developers will take the low road and allow their own subjects to advertise in their apps.
This is far less likely to happen when it comes to apps that compare very specific ranges of products. These apps often focus on just one product, such as a modern digital camera, and the customer can then compare all the different pros and cons of particular models against each other. The in-app advertising can then be much more targeted, as once the user chooses a particular thing to buy, the ad can advertise where to buy it. With this growing app market, there is likely much more to expect soon.
