Everyone is looking for a great deal this holiday shopping season and the Yahoo! Shopping iPhone app aims to put consumers in the know when it comes to comparing prices. However, Yahoo! Shopping doesn’t break any new ground and as a typical shopping/price comparison program, it falls flat.
The free app’s homepage is supposed to show some of the season’s hottest products and conveniently show pricing and review information, but getting the products to scroll was hit or miss, and when it did scroll, the app crashed.
When searching for products, you can narrow the product category if you wish, but I got the same results for my search when I used “all” as when I specified “home & garden.” If you choose to view a product within a price range, you’ll see all the sites where you can buy it and the different pricing. The app boasts the ability to figure shipping and sales tax to your current location, but this never worked for me — the app showed “N/A” in both fields for all of the zip codes I tested.
Surprising no one, many search results are from Amazon.com, which makes me think that checking prices via Amazon.com’s app would be a better use of time if you’re standing in a brick-and-mortar store. Additionally, the app only offers 40 search results per items, which means you could still be potentially missing out on a better deal somewhere.
I won’t be keeping Yahoo! Shopping on my iPhone this shopping season — instead, I’ll stick to using Google shopping via Safari. In this case, the iPhone’s browser is faster and it provides better search results, too.
