New to the iTunes App Store is the free Tecca app, a technology-centered personal shopping/price comparison app, which launched using capital from the digital media fund created by mega electronics retailer Best Buy.
Tecca works like other shopping apps you’ve seen, only this time the products fall solely in the realm of technology and gadgetry. Through the app, you can search for specific products or browse existing categories; from there, see product details, pricing, images and reviews. You can add items to your wish list or add products to your Tecca shopping cart. Although the tab says “Buy,” you can’t actually make a purchase through Tecca itself. Instead, the app works as a retail window, launching a pop-up merchant page. That means if the product is at Best Buy (where I used to work, a long time ago), you’ll need to add the item to your Best Buy shopping cart through the interface and complete your purchase as you would in any normal browser.
To use the “Wish List” and “Buy” functions, a free account with Tecca is required. An account is also required to use Tecca’s scanning function, and that annoys me. Yes, registration through the app is easy, but there’s no reason for this to be a necessity and I would guess this will turn off many prospective users. Plus, I strongly believe that tech-related apps should be held to a higher standard when it comes to UI, so I was disappointed in Tecca’s slow speed, both in searching and when flipping between the app’s native pages. There aren’t many search filters available, either, which made finding a product without the barcode scan a pain.
There’s also a concern if Tecca’s search results are accurate in terms of finding the lowest price, or if Best Buy’s funding is influencing results in favor of the big box store. Best Buy results were by far the most frequent, with all of the other results (on my tests anyway) coming from retailers I’ve never heard of. Either way, Tecca’s results weren’t reliable; in one instance, it displayed the price of a television at $400 more than on the retailer’s actual website. In others, it completely missed the best deal found with a Google search.
Overall, I wasn’t impressed with Tecca and I don’t think you’ll be either.
